Just a little history: How Wake Forest went from corn to town

This is a very abbreviated history of Wake Forest as it went from corn plantation to bustling town the size of cities in some states.

We would not be Wake Forest without Dr. Calvin Jones, a true American because he moved a lot, who was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on April 2, 1775, earned his medical license at 17 and moved to Smithfield, N.C. when he was 20. Five years later he wrote a series of newspaper editorials urging North Carolinians to understand and adopt the new smallpox vaccine that had just been developed in Europe, as he always found the newest ideas in health care, popularized them and used them.

He was one of the incorporators of the North Carolina Medical Society in 1799. He moved to Raleigh in 1801, where he was elected mayor and later a representative in the General Assembly. He published an early Raleigh newspaper and continued to practice cutting edge medicine. Jones became the state’s chief military officer and in 1813, during the War of 1812, his military maneuvers prevented a British fleet from invading the coast.

In 1821, shortly after his marriage to a wealthy Franklin County widow, he bought a 615-acre corn plantation in what was then called the Forest of Wake. Having studied eye care in Europe, he removed cataracts from patients in his new home at a time when anesthesia was unknown. (The director of the Wake Forest Historical Museum, Ed Morris, says, “If these walls could talk, they would scream.”

In order to have timely mail service, he became the postmaster for the area, which he began calling Wake Forest. In 1832, having sold his plantation to the North Carolina Baptist Convention, he moved his family and his slaves to land he purchased near Bolivar, Tennessee.

The Baptists wanted the land – and the big new house and all the plantation outbuildings – for a manual institute which would teach future Baptist ministers about the Bible and other studies while providing labor for corn and other crops. That institute was chartered in 1834, but the students began asking for more education, less agriculture. In 1838 the fledgling school was chartered as Wake Forest College, and its trustees immediately began building three buildings, a large three- to four-floor building that would house students – Wait Hall after Samuel Wait, its first president – and two houses for the college staff and professors, the North Brick House (since razed) and the South Brick House.

The new college grew in popularity and student enrollment, and for commerce and the articles of everyday living it depended on the village of Forestville where there were stores. And in 1840 there was also the train depot, the stop on the new Raleigh & Gaston Railroad which also functioned as a post office. The students walked the mile to watch the engines puffing smoke from the fires in their bellies fed by wood.

Meanwhile the college trustees, always short of funds, decided to sell what they had in abundance, land. They laid out streets and sold lots to college professors, who then built houses – the beginning of history-rich North Main, formerly Faculty Avenue.

The college closed during the Civil War because all the students enlisted in the Confederate army. As the fighting grew closer in Virginia, the army began sending wounded soldiers south on the R&G, and classrooms were turned into hospitals and overflow was housed in hastily-built huts.

The college slowly began to recover after 1865. On the east side of the railroad tracks there was only pine forests and some farms. And it was a long and dusty or muddy mile south to board the trains or get the mail. The college trustees began to appeal to the R&G owners to move the little depot from Forestville to the college, and in 1874 they were successful.

The small building was loaded onto flatbed cars and carried north a mile where it was placed on the west (college) side of the track.

And men began buying and selling the land on the east side of the tracks. Dr. John Benjamin Powers built the three-story white building next to the tracks in 1898; White Street was laid out on an east-side slope; and businessmen began building stores along it.

Forestville dwindled, but not before it had been chartered as a town in 1879. Not to be outdone, the Town of Wake Forest College was chartered in 1880, a creation of the college.

Former slaves who remained in town had been building houses out of scrap lumber and logs just outside the town limits, and many of the adults worked as household help or had menial jobs in the new businesses. Olive Branch Baptist Church which had grown out of the student church on campus built its first place of worship.

By this time, as the college registration grew, many professors and their wives opened their houses as boarding houses, renting room and serving meals to students. Businesses that catered to students thrived like the pool rooms, restaurants and, later, movie theaters.

Urging by the college trustees and probably town residents who saw the benefits of electricity in other states and cities made the town commissioners eager to provide a generator and an electric system. But there was language in the town’s 1880 charter which prevented that, so in 1909 the town was rechartered as the Town of Wake Forest with the ability to build an electric system. The charter was changed but the town government was the same, with closed-door meetings and hand-written minutes, and the college and its trustees were the only slightly hidden power behind the throne. The only town official aside from the mayor and commissioners was the cotton weigher.

The town suffered through the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, 1919 and 1920, with deaths in all three years. The 1920s may have seen flappers and speakeasies in other states and town, but in Wake Forest the controversy was whether students could dance. The college trustees and staff were solidly anti-dancing. The fraternities sometimes got around that by holding dances in Raleigh hotels. And the town charter said that no liquor could be sold in town or within a mile of the town limits. That led to bars, at least one of which still exists, all a careful few yards past the one-mile limit.

The 1930s were difficult, with both local banks closing their doors and many people losing their homes because they could not pay the mortgage. The town purchased several homes and may have let the families remain in them until such time as they could recover and buy them back. The cotton industry was in decline, with farmers losing their farms, but cotton was still the backbone of local farming.

In the 1940s the college had to finally accept female students because almost all the male students were off fighting World War II. And immediately after the war ended the population boomed with all the returned students and new GI Bill students who lived in trailers and former barracks on the former college baseball field and tennis courts.

Builders began in the 1950s (population 3,704) to build houses in small subdivisions near or next to the town limits, which were the same as those in 1880. But the college really did leave town in 1956, leaving only a small Baptist seminary in its stead. The town was demoralized with businesses closing, people leaving and no savior in sight.

But there was one change. The General Assembly rewrote the laws governing towns, and for the first time the meetings had to be public and were held in the 1930s town hall on Brooks Avenue in the second-floor courtroom where the old Recorder’s Court was held. It would be the 1980s before Wake Forest got a District Court once a month.

The 1950s were also the years Wake Electric, which started in a one-story addition to the Wake Forest Town Hall, began to grow to the seven-county large cooperative it is today. It was a boon to local businesses which sold and serviced washers, refrigerators, stoves and dryers, and Wake Electric’s annual meeting at the school on Sycamore Avenue was headline news. Because of operating boundaries drawn years ago, today a large portion of the town is served by Wake Electric instead of Wake Forest Power.

The 1960s (population 2,664)saw the first of the town’s industrial era when Schrader Bros. came to a plant built for it on Wake Union Church Road. Soon we had Athey and Weavexx on South Main Street,  then named U.S. 1-A. And many local people worked at the Burlington Mills plant on U.S. 1 toward Raleigh.

The town also had a 20-bed hospital, a branch of Wake Memorial Hospital in Raleigh. Four doctors, Dr. Albert Corpening, Dr. Nash Underwood, Dr. George C. Mackie and Dr. C.T. Wilkinson, used the hospital for everything from births to major surgeries.

In the 1970s and 1980s the town began to grow, expanding to the west and the south, though there were extended court battles about expansion.

The town also had something new, a new charter which included a new form of town government, with a town manager taking over the administrative duties the mayor once performed. Mayor Wait Brewer Jr. in the 1960s filled out and applied for all the federal, state and local permits and grants to build the water treatment plant at the foot of the Smith Creek Reservoir dam and the new 300,000-gallon water tank on South White Street with Town Clerk Anna Holden, the first woman in that job, as his only assistant.

It was a time when the local newspaper, The Wake Weekly, kept everyone informed with its local correspondents such as Mrs. D.P. “Gertie” Jenks in the Falls community, and its “Local & Social” column with its who visited what family and whose relatives were in town gave everyone gossip fodder for the week.

The town saw steady annual growth through the 1990s, and in 1997 broke the 10,000 mark with 10,284 people. The 2000 Census found 14,288 residents. That annual growth continued such that there were almost twice as many Wake Foresters in 2010 – 30,818. By 2016 the town had 41,157 residents, and it was no surprise – given eight new people in town each day – when the town had 50,000-plus in 2020, but it was unprecedented growth.

2000 was probably the starting point, for it was then that Andy Ammons bought the land and built the extension of Rogers Road which connected his new subdivision, Heritage Wake Forest, to South Main Street. His creation, a subdivision which left the pines his father and brothers and he had planted over a decade, which left the hills and valleys, was something new and something that unfortunately has not been emulated.

The fact is that in the next 20 years local builders and subdivision creators have been responding to the real pressure from the North Carolinians and those from away, as they say in Maine, to move to the Triangle, with Wake Forest one of the most attractive towns in the area.

Heritage led to Traditions and Tryon and Macon Oaks, Everly, Del Webb, Holding Village, Bridgeport, Grove 98 and all the rest. The new Apple East Coast headquarters will increase the pressure.

In those last 20 years, the Town of Wake Forest has responded to resident pressure by building a still-expanding greenway system, redone the streetscape in downtown White Street, built a wonderful new E. Carroll Joyner Park and continued to refurbish the existing parks, built a new town hall, provided the resources for a low-key efficient police department, added the formerly independent Wake Forest Fire Department to its responsibilities, and continues to provide other basics like waste/recycling collection though its water and sewer systems are now owned by Raleigh.

The last few years have seen a decrease in the contributions of volunteers. Where once the fireworks and stadium show were products of countless volunteer hours cheerfully given because that’s what neighbors do, the influx of new people without the strong ties to the town and its people and the death and aging of former volunteers mean that volunteer ethic is at a low ebb.

Yes, there is traffic, and yes, developers now clearcut and level land for subdivisions, and yes, more development is on the way. But the other side of the coin is that there are specialty physicians with offices in town, there is diversity in restaurants (though not enough yet), there are highly-ranked local high school teams in many sports, there are (in normal years which we hope to have in 2021 and onward) local music, dance, Irish and other festivals and charity events crowding the calendar. Local charities help people in ways county, state and federal governments do not. We have a diverse population, which will only grow.

If you want a more indepth history, the town published in 2009, its centennial year, a book about that 100 years called “Connections: 100 Years of Wake Forest History.” The book is still available at the Wake Forest Community Library. You can also contact the author at cwpelosi@aol.com

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