Just a little history: The early years of the WF Fire Department

(I could not find this article in time to post it last week when the fire department, now part of town government, was named as one of 18 Class 1 fire departments in North Carolina with six of them in Wake County. The rural fire department served by the Wake Forest Fire Department was at the same time advanced from a Class 5 to a Class 3, meaning the entire county now has exceptional fire service.)

Wake Forest began as an educational institution, first with manual labor part of the day, then the college, and it took 40-plus years before there were enough people in town that a town government was organized. Of course, it was probably spurred to do because Forestville, half a mile to the south, was chartered as the Town of Forestville in 1879. A year later, in 1880, the village that grew up around the college, became the Town of Wake Forest College with a mayor – the first one was James S. Purefoy, also the richest man in town – elected every year as were the commissioners. In 1909 the charter was changed by the General Assembly to the Town of Wake Forest, allowing the sale of bonds to build an electric system and extending the terms of town officials.

Town government was very much influenced by the college, with professors elected as mayors and town commissioners in a town of 1,500, almost all either on the college faculty or somehow dependent on it. It was surely the college which wanted electricity and then, a few years later in 1920, a town water and sewer system. (The college already had a water and sewer system, but it was small. Everyone else in town had backyard privies and chamber pots under the beds.)

So in 1920 the town awarded a contract for a water and sewer system that included fire hydrants. In all the years before, fighting any fire in town was a matter of a bucket brigade or calling for help from Raleigh, which had a fire department.

The water for the three miles of pipe came from a small impoundment in Smith Creek, and the town had permission from the state to build sewer lines that spewed untreated waste into Richland and Smith Creeks. The water treatment plant was on what is now Elm Avenue (It is now, greatly remodeled, a dentist’s office.) with an elevated water tank behind it. In later years the water tank was strung with colored lights during the Christmas holiday season.

With the new systems in place, in 1921 the town organized a fire department, naming Thomas M. Arrington Sr. as chief and excusing him and the 19 volunteers from the street tax. The new department’s mission was to protect the town, the college and the Royall Cotton Mill even though it was in a separate town. (Although the mill owners lived in Wake Forest, the separate town was created to avoid paying town taxes.)

The first fire apparatus was a hand-pulled two-wheel hose reel with 500 feet of hose, and a second was purchased very soon. The town board directed the Home Telephone & Telegraph Company with its operators in the basement of the T.E. Holding Pharmacy building on South White Street to have night operators and give “instant notice” of a fire alarm to the chief and volunteers.

The town rented the front of Harris’ garage for the fire department and fire truck at $12.50 a month. The fire truck, never really described, was “American LaFrance fire equipment” costing $1,650. Was that a fire truck? In the middle of the 1920s, according to Wake Forest Fire Department’s own history, it says the first truck was “an old Westcott automobile purchased from John Brewer and converted by firefighters into a combination chemical and hose wagon. The top is cut off of the car, a bed is constructed for hose, a basket is installed to hold chemical tanks, and provisions are made for carrying ladders, etc.”

At about the same time, 1923, the town installed electric fire alarm boxes in town and on each floor in the new school for white children, the two-story building on South Main Street later called the Benton Building that stood until 1991 when it was torn down to make way for a new building. There were only 11 fire boxes at first, ringing alarms in the homes of the firemen, but the number grew to 54 or more until they were removed years later.

In 1926, the Sanborn Fire Insurance map said the fire department had one chief and an assistant chief, 20 volunteers, a fire station with a Wescott truck with American LaFrance combination hose and chemical equipment, 1,000 feet of hose, one 60-gallon chemical tank and 200 feet of chemical hose, two hand reels with 500 feet of hose each, two 24-foot extension ladders, one roof ladder, and 500 feet of reserve hose along with the Gamewell fire alarm system with 11 boxes.

The town had a fire department, but it also had disastrous fires. On April 22, 1927, according to the Raleigh News & Observer, “Three buildings, housing two cafes and town’s only movie theater, are destroyed by a late morning fire. Discovered about 11:00 a.m., the flames also consume a pair of barber shops housed in the second stories of two of the buildings. The Raleigh Fire Department is ‘summoned immediately,’ arriving at the college town in a mere 17 minutes. They aid Wake Forest firefighters in ‘checking the flames’ and preventing their spread to other structures. Total damage is estimated at between $40,000 and $50,000. (Nearly all of the fixtures of H.E. Joyner’s luncheonette are rescued; the other two buildings are ‘but superficially furnished.’) Wake Forest is located 18.94 miles from Raleigh The fire department’s 17-minute run averages 66.93 mph.” The luncheonette, in its several locations, would soon become known as Shorty’s.

Apparently the Franklinton Fire Department also responded because the town wrote notes of thanks to both departments and sent $25 to Raleigh and $10 to Franklinton along with the notes.

In 1930 the town commissioners and mayor – who met in secret with minutes handwritten by one of them and sometimes the only notation was the date and time – decided to build a town hall, a municipal building, even though the only town employees were two white men operating the water and sewer system, two or three African-American men and one mule, employed to remove the piles of manure horses, mules and wandering cows deposited on the dirt streets. One of those men, hired in 1932, was George Massenburg, who retired in April of 1975, who had the longest record of service for the town and who is honored by the name on the Alston-Massenburg Center. Edward Alston was an organizer and principal volunteer in the Colored Volunteer Fire Department when it was formed in 1942 with a garage for a station and a well-used truck handed down by the white department. The new town hall went up on Brooks Street with space for the fire department in the basement. It is now a substation for the Wake Forest Police Department.

On May 4, 1933 J.L. Taylor was appointed fire chief just before an arsonist, almost surely a college student, began two years of fires that would destroy college buildings, the new high school for white students, and other buildings. It was a time of great fear and great loss.

On the night of May 5, 1933 a fire destroyed Wait Hall, the original college building, constructed in 1838 of brick made on site by slaves. Only discovered about 3 a.m., the fire was too far advanced for Wake Forest firefighters and those from Raleigh and other towns to do anything but contain it to one building. Irreplaceable portraits of college presidents and historic college records and books were destroyed.

On May 31, 1933 the newly-constructed high school for white students on Sycamore Avenue was destroyed by a blaze that was again beyond control when it was discovered. The school district had heavily insured the new three-story building and it was reconstructed from the original plans and still stands as part of Wake Forest Elementary School.

The arsonist was quiet during the fall college semester though there were attempts at different times to set fire to homes and fraternity houses, attempts that were frustrated by quick detection and doused. At least one house still has some charred spots on its foundation.

But he was successful in the winter. On Feb. 14, 1934, Wingate Hall, the science building and then the college’s oldest building, was destroyed. The fire was discovered about 2 a.m. and had enough headway that the Wake Forest and Raleigh fire departments could not save the building.

Days later, on Feb. 20, there was an attempt to burn down Hunter Dormitory. A wad of burning paper was found stuffed under the floor at the south end of the building at 3 a.m. This time Wake Forest firemen doused the small fire and saved the building.

The arsonist was more successful in the early morning hours of March 2 when the clubhouse at the Wake Forest Golf Club (now Paschal Golf Club) burned to the ground.

By this time the town board began to discuss buying a fire truck, and on Feb. 16, 1935, the mayor and fire chief were authorized to buy a fire truck with a 500 GPM Barton pump on a Chevrolet chassis that cost $1,524.68 with Wake Forest College paying half the cost.

The college trustees were reluctant to help the town with the purchase – they had been forced to cut professors’ salaries in the spring of 1934 – but after Wingate Hall was destroyed they agreed to pay half the cost of the truck. The firemen called her Maude.

The college had hired a detective to ferret out the arsonist; college students organized a campus watch; men in town sat up during the nights with their shotgun or deer rifle on their knees, watching their house and those of their neighbors. Everyone feared the next alarm, the next fire.

There were strong suspicions about that one student who was advised of those and encouraged to leave town after the spring 1934 semester, which he did. There were no more arson fires after he left.

In 1982, Thomas Arrington Jr., son of the first fire chief, said more than 70 fires were set over the two-year period and 17 buildings were burned. Every building on campus had a fire set in it, though most were found in time to save the building.

The decade of the 1930s ended peacefully with small purchases – a rack for hoses – and no fires reported in the department’s own history.

(Information for this was taken largely from the Wake Forest Fire Department’s own history on its web page with some additions from Connections . . . 100 Years of Wake Forest History.)

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