Just a little history: Henry Miller left a loving legacy

A quiet man with a face that loved to smile, Henry Love Miller was a quiet force for good throughout his life in Wake Forest.

Miller was a country boy from Texas with a limited education, but after he left the U.S. Army in 1924 he came to Wake Forest. One of his early jobs was working for Ray Harris, who set up the local Ford dealership in 1927 in the building where the state association of surveyors is now one of the tenants.

By 1940, Miller and his first wife, Ida Belle, had saved enough for him to buy that dealership and the building from Harris along with a Texaco dealership. After World War II, Miller operated a school in the dealership building for veterans using the G.I. Bill, teaching them to become mechanics.

In 1945 Miller also purchased a local oil dealership. He operated Miller Oil Company in the small white building on East Elm Avenue where DAB International is now located until 1979, when he sold it to McCracken Oil.

He had a do-it-yourself coin car wash in what is now the parking lot for the Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce. That was when the chamber building housed the Wake Forest Fire Department and the Wake Forest Rural Fire Department was housed next door in a twin building that is now the Williams-Walters Building.

Miller put a lot of his profits – he and Ida Belle did not splurge on themselves – into land. But then he would give it away. When the Wake County Hospital Authority decided to build a branch hospital in Wake Forest on South Allen Road, it was Miller who donated the land. The hospital opened in 1961. He also donated the land for the park behind town hall, a park that bears his name.

He was a three-term mayor, a member of the board and long-time chairman of Wake Forest Federal Savings & Loan and he helped establish and then was a director and chairman for the Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce.

In 1961, after county voters turned down a ballot proposal to establish a county-wide library system, Miller was among the many town residents who worked to build a town library. Holding Cotton Company, who had just moved down South White Street into two new warehouses with a company office, rented their old office – the brick building next to The Cotton Company – to the new library at a nominal price, high school ag students built the wood shelves, people donated books and the new Wake Forest Woman’s Club held fund-raising bridge nights at the Community House to pay expenses. Miller was the first and only chairman of the library there. Later, in the 1980s, he was part of the group who convinced Central Carolina Bank to build a new building and sell the old one to the town for the library, which had long since outgrown the rented space.

He not only gave money, he gave his time and effort to help people. Clarence Forte remembered years ago returning to Wake Forest and noticing there were no baseball fields for black youngsters. He told Miller, who was then the mayor, that the town needed to do something about this lack, and Miller told him to return the next day. When Forte went to the oil company office and asked for Miller, he was told he could find him up on North White Street. And there he was, on a bulldozer, clearing some land he owned and smoothing the dirt to make the ball field.

In 1956, after prodding by Bertha Perry, then Mayor Miller began talking about the black children and teens who needed recreation as much as white children. There was resistance, of course, but Miller kept politely pushing until the town passed a $30,000 bond issue and the Taylor Street Pool opened in 1959. The pool house has now been transformed by creative renovation into the Alston-Massenburg Center.

A man this editor met years ago in a laundromat said his most vivid memory of Miller was when he dashed into a burning building to save him. Miller had worked in the oil fields in Oklahoma and was familiar with fire fighting and fire suppression techniques. Everyone else was spraying water on the fire which made the oil float and exposed more of it to the air.

And his grandson, Lane Miller, remembers more. (This was after Henry Love Miller died in 1991 at 92.)

“Even though I was the first-born son of Oscar and Nita Miller, I was named after my grandfather. My parents used Lane as my middle name (instead of Love), but I did take on the name of Henry (Lane) Miller. Guess they thought “Love” may have been a tough one to shake growing up. Who knows!

“In the summer months (1959-1967) I would practically live with Henry and Ida Belle Miller. My days began with riding my FarmAll pedal tractor from their home at 536 E. Waite Ave. (yes, it used to have the “e” on the end) up to the oil company (aka H.L. Miller Oil). I would ride the sidewalk past what was my grandmother’s dry cleaners (on the corner of E. Wait and the street going down beside the electric membership corporation), continuing up the hill and turning left at the corner by another dry cleaners, then on past the police department and the courthouse, past Mr. Wooten’s insurance office and the laundromat, Keith’s Super Market, and finally right and into the oil company parking lot.

“I would spend my day there getting in the way of C.Y. Holding, Donnie Hight, Robert Gay, and most of all Carl “Mac” McMillan. I recently had breakfast with Mac, and he was as witty as ever.

“My grandmother worked in the office, and every penny was watched, you can bet on that! I remember at nights my grandfather and I would go up to the car wash and empty the coin boxes. I would always get a Yoo-Hoo drink from the glass door vending machine. We would take the quarters to my grandmother at home and she would pour them out on the bed, where she and I would commence to total the find, stacking them in fours, making one dollar increments.

“When it was haircut time, my Pa Pa would take me to Barney Powell, one of the two barber shops uptown.

“You need to know that I spent lots of nights under houses, crawling in the floor spaces, holding the flashlight while my grandfather repaired customers’ furnaces. Keep in mind that was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He was born in 1899, so he was no spring chicken, and he continued that well into the 1970s.

“It’s a fact he was probably more of a father figure to me than my dad. I learned the asphalt business from my dad, but more about life from my Pa Pa.

“I could certainly go on and on, but simply put, he loved the town of Wake Forest, and they loved him back.

“I still miss him. I always will.”

In his will and then after his second wife, Angie, died in 2000 Miller left money to several Wake Forest entities. Those last bequests were: The $47,000 he left to the Wake Forest library was used in the recent expansion of the building. The $47,000 left to the Trentini Foundation was put into a trust account which has helped the foundation increase the amount of its annual scholarship to a Wake Forest High School graduating senior attending a four-year college and to add a second scholarship for a graduating senior attending a technical college. The Wake Forest Fire Department received $25,000. Rolesville EMS and Wake County EMS received $12,500 each.

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