There was an error in last week’s history article about Binkley Chapel that was corrected by Ed Morris, the executive director of the Wake Forest Historical Museum. “
“Dr. Binkley may have well raised funds for the spire on the Chapel that now bears his name but it was not added later. Early construction photos of the chapel’s steel frame clearly shows the spire as part of the original structure as it is first being built. Dr. Binkley began his teaching career at Wake Forest College, his alma mater, in 1933 and remained there until 1944 when he went to teach at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He returned to teach at the newly organized Southeastern Seminary in 1952. I expect it was in the planning phase (1930s) for the chapel that he raised the funds for the spire.”
That squares with Murray Greason’s memories of him and the other boys he ran around town with climbing high on the incomplete chapel. “One of more of this crowd on one or more occasions gained entry to the construction site and worked our way upwards, exploring all the various levels available, including above what would become the ceiling of the chapel auditorium and the chapel tower or steeple. It was a great adventure, but looking back, it is a miracle that no one fell to their death below!”
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The Wake Forest Town Board will consider two planning items when it meets at 7 p.m. next Tuesday, whether to approve the Wegmans grocery store master plan unanimously recommended by the planning board last week and whether to approve a 40-mile-per-hour speed limit on Durham Road (N.C. 98 Business).
They will also appoint members to the board of adjustment and planning board, consider authorizing an installment purchase contract to pay for the downtown streetscape improvements now underway along South White Street, and whether to authorize Town Manager Kip Padgett to rename North Brooks Street (a one-block north-south street that connects Spring Street and East Pine Avenue. North Brooks would become Old Branch Lane, and South Brooks Street would be officially South Brooks.
The editor always thought for a street to have a directional (east, west, north, south) there had to be a matching street farther away, and Wake Forest has and has had several streets where there is unbuilt section between parts of the same street. But this suggestion is for a new name for what the town had designated as North Brooks. Why then would it be South Brooks instead of plain Brooks Street?
