100 years of history
By Carol W. Pelosi
After many problems, mostly financial, the new Town of Wake Forest finally threw the switch to provide electricity to the few customers it had.
“To students and townspeople it was a red-letter day to be marked on the calendar and permanently in memory when they could throw away the oil lamps,” Dr. E.E. Folk, an English professor at Wake Forest College, wrote in his bicentennial history of the town.
The Raleigh News & Observer noted that on the night of November 11, 1909 the switch was thrown and Wake Forest had streetlights. “There was great cheering by the students when the lights were turned on and they had an informal celebration tonight. There are 17 large tungsten lights on the streets of the town.”
The minimum charge was $1.25 a month if you had two lights and used no more than 754 kilowatts. If you had not paid your bill by the 10th of the month, your service was cut off and you were charged $1.50 for the reconnection.
For most people in town, electric lights were the only use for the new town utility, and not everyone rushed to get those. Dr. I. Beverly Lake Sr., the Wake Forest native who ended a career in law as a justice on the state Supreme Court, said his family only got electricity in 1915. Professor J.L. Lake and his family moved that year from a house on the corner of Pine Avenue and North College Street into a house on North Main Street.
“That was a great event. It was a great evening for all of us,” Dr. Lake said in 1983 about the move to the new house with its electric lights. However, the family still used an icebox. A Mr. Penny brought a cake of ice every morning from the ice plant downtown. “I was a grown man when Mother got an electric refrigerator.”
The town had installed some electric street lights. It was the job of the only town policeman, W.W. Bobbitt, the same man who earned $35 a month but could not collect any fees, to maintain those lights. Even so, the thrifty town fathers decreed that the lights not be turned on during the full moon because people could see well enough by the light of the moon.
Lake also recalled having to go up the street on dark autumn nights where only a single streetlight flickered in the wind. It was a terror-filled journey for a young lad to go from home to Pompey Holding’s barn for the pail of milk for his family.
The town did get some requests for power for motors and for milling companies, and in 1914 Carolina Power & Light Company proposed to enlarge and run the electric plant. The town board turned down that offer and considered applying for a $4,000 loan for the work instead.
In February of 1915, several townspeople from Youngsville came to Wake Forest to ask if the town could also provide electricity to their town. In July, the 88 white male voters in Wake Forest voted (75 for and two against) for $10,000 worth of bonds to expand the electric plant in the brick building next to the railroad tracks.
Then in October of 1915, the Wake Forest board approved an ordinance giving CP&L a 60-year franchise to transmit and supply power to the town. The town agreed to pay the utility a minimum of $130 a month.
Two men who had supplied wood shavings to power the boiler at the electric plant, A.M. Harris and J.H. Mitchell, were given rebates on their bills. The board did not approve H.E. Joyner’s request for reduced rates for current to run the motion picture show.
The negotiations with Youngsville apparently were dropped at some point, but in 1918 the town agreed to install an electric line to the town of Forestville “providing there are as many as five customers and it is done at no cost to the town.” A.M. Harris, who operated a store, gas station and bar out of his home which was conveniently just more than a mile away from the town, paid the $263.50 for the line and was repaid by the next customers on the line. (His was the gray house on the west side of South Main was recently torn down to make way for an office building.)
In 1918 the town also hired a man who was to become an institution, Oscar M. McKaughan. McKaughan would be the town’s director of utilities for the next 40 years, and it seemed the board recognized his worth early.
He was hired at $150 a month, but the town paid the freight for his household goods — $43.26 – and that fall helped him buy a car that was to cost under $500. The debt on the Ford was forgiven before he repaid it all because he used the car to read meters.
Next week, we will tackle a timely subject, drinking water.
What was happening in July of 2003?
The Wake Forest Town Board was considering a bond referendum for $5 or $10 million to improve the town’s chances for state money for high-priority streets. One of the more sobering facts is that the town has identified more than $350 million in needed street and sidewalk improvements. Money to purchase right-of-way to widen South Main Street, which is owned by the North Carolina Department of Transportation would be one of investments the town could make with the possible bond issue.
The town has received a grant of $150,000 to build the portion of South Franklin Street to the bypass. The town-owned land was the site for its first very small wastewater treatment plant, and Police Chief Harvey Newsome was the operator, who checked it daily.
Commissioners Velma Boyd and David Camacho had filed for election for a second term each on the town board.
The Gazette was continuing to press its opinion that the Town of Wake Forest not agree for Raleigh to take oveir and manage its water and sewer systems. There was an article about the high turnover at the city’s water treatment plant on Falls of Neuse Road. There were also safety issues at the plant and it was discharging some waste from the water plant into a small stream which flowed into Falls Lake near the water plant’s intake. Also, Wake Forest has refused to accept Raleigh water at times because it did not meet state and federal standards.
Congressman Brad Miller was to be at the Wake Forest Town Hall on August 14 for two hours and invited all area residents to attend with their concerns or problems.
###
