When we think about Wake Forest in the 1920s, we have to keep remembering it was a small town that just had its first paved roads, a few streets like South White Street and the big national U.S. 1 that led to Raleigh, winding along North Main Street, around the Wake Forest College campus and then down South Main Street and Powell Road to the Neuse River. It was local resistance that kept the engineers from running it through the middle of the campus.
There was the radio for news and entertainment, and the Seaboard Coastline Railroad still provided a great deal of the transportation for people, farm products, other goods and the mail.
Separate as it was from other towns, it also separated itself into distinct classes and cultures all undergirded by racial segregation and discrimination.
There was the center of town, the college campus, where in 1925 there were just slightly more than 700 young men and 31 professors, all white and all male. One of the major issues of the time was the students’ lack of attendance at chapel and church.
The Wake Forest Baptist Church, which had grown from services conducted by students in college classrooms, had built an imposing and beautiful copper-domed building on the campus in 1914. And as a historian noted recently, the building itself reflected the tug between the campus and the town, with the main entrance facing the campus and the secondary entrance facing the town.
Although there were other churches and other denominations in the area, Wake Forest Baptist’s congregation included the college faculty and staff and their families as well as the families of the town’s leading merchants. Social events, aside from family gatherings, were those in the church, the school and of course the college.
“Wake Forest has only one church – the Baptist church – which is the center of all activities,” Zua Davis wrote to a friend in 1915. Zua and her husband, Priestley, had moved back to Wake Forest that summer and were raising three little girls. Priestley opened a furniture business in a three-story building downtown and installed an elevator, the first in town.
“Priestley’s father is clerk of the old Episcopal church about two miles from here,” Zua went on, referring to Wake Union Church which had originally sheltered three different congregations. “Prior to Grand Papa Davis becoming clerk, my grandfather, Calvin Mitchell, was clerk until he died.
“We feel it will be best for the children to go to the local church. Grand Papa Davis is not happy about our choice.”
Families such as the Davises had a cook, a maid, a yard man, a washer woman and a seamstress, all black who all lived in what is now called the Northeast Community.
The mill village, of course, was separate with its own church, Glen Royal Baptist, and school. Don Johnston Jr., whose father was the head of Royall Cotton Mill during the 1930s and early 1940s, said in his unpublished 1954 thesis at Princeton University that there was a distinct feeling of paternalism on the part of the mill management in the early days and “A feeling of class distinction between town and (mill) village was evident.”
In fact, the mill and its village were a separate incorporated town from 1907 until 1943 when the charter was repealed at the request of the mill management. However, in 1929, R.E. Royall, one of the mill’s founders, wrote that he had declined every offer to locate the mill inside the town, thereby saving $8,000 or $9,000 by not paying town property taxes. That seems a bit high, but then the mill was built on land Royall and his partner, W.C. Powell, had purchased in 1884.
At about that same time, 1931, the Wake Forest commissioners saw fit to tote up the profits from the electric system — $8,000 for the year – and the new water system – just over $4,000. The town fathers would have liked to sell electricity to Royall Cotton Mill, but the plant generated its own electricity from a steam plant until Carolina Power & Light located a substation nearby. Because of the continuing profits from the electric system, the town commissioners turned down yet another offer from CP&L to purchase the system.
Another of the members of the original board of directors for the mill, T.E. Holding, was a successful pharmacist and had founded the Bank of Wake, which occupied a corner of his building. Across the street was the Citizens Bank which had been started by W.C. Brewer, a successful merchant and an associate of Powell in the mill.
As for the paving, the town engineer was ordered to lay out and mark Sycamore Avenue where the new high school would be built as well as North and South Wingate streets and Pine Street. West Sycamore was to be “ploughed, scraped and put into passable condition.”
White Street from Owen Avenue south to the Trotman car dealership was to be graded for paving. That would be from the old post office down to the pottery shop (now offices for the state surveyors association), not quite a block.
In those days, streets were curbed with granite blocks. It is still possible to determine the old town limits by checking for the granite curbing.
More water and sewer lines were being built. H.P. Smith, S.W. Brewer, H.M. Vann and A.C. Reid paid to install a sewer line in their street, West Sycamore, west of the high school. Meanwhile, the town took ownership of the college sewer line. (The college had installed water and sewer lines and put bathrooms in its dormitory buildings several years before.)
There were no water or sewer lines built north of Wait Avenue or east of North White Street, the section of town where most black residents lived. Nor were there any water or sewer lines in the mill village. Hand-dug wells provided water and the necessary, the privy or outhouse, was in the back yard.
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