100 years of history
By Carol Pelosi
A small brick building on North Main Street made zoning and state history in 1930, becoming the subject of the first zoning case heard by the North Carolina Supreme Court.
In 1923, quiet dead-end Faculty Avenue had become part of U.S. 1, stretching from Maine to Florida, when federal engineers conquered the bluff at its north end. Automobiles and tourists rolled down the broad street which had recently been paved and edged with granite curb stones.
Twenty years before, in 1905, A.J. “Jack” Medlin had built the brick general store which is now an office owned by Cooke’s Restoration.
“I bought my first air rifle there,” Dr. I. Beverly Lake Sr., then retired as a Supreme Court justice recalled in 1982. The Lake family lived down the street, and Lake was a year older than the store.
Medlin made arrangements to keep some of that tourist money in town. He installed a dining room in part of the store, and he turned his house beside the store into a tourist lodge. The house was built around 1900 by I.T. “Pompey” Holding Jr., who owned a large farm north of Faculty Avenue. Holding is believed to have built the house for his daughter, Eugenia, who later married Medlin.
Along with the other improvements, Medlin wanted to enlarge his old curbside filling station and put in gasoline pumps.
Horrors! A shudder rippled the length of Faculty Avenue, shaking the college administration and the town government. Faculty Avenue was the most prestigious address in Wake Forest, a place where college professors, town merchants and professional men had their substantial homes. The only other commercial building on the street was the Jackson-Powell general store at the corner of North Main Street and North Avenue, now The Corner.
Apparently, or as the lawyers later claimed, residents along the street were convinced the gasoline pumps and the stored gasoline would pose a danger to school children and the college campus.
“Quite a delegation appeared before the board to enter a protest against the alteration or improvement of a filling station operated by A.J. Medlin at his place on N. Main,” Clerk J.C. Caddell recorded in the town board minutes for Dec. 6, 1928.
A large number of residents had also signed a petition. The town board took no action then, but at the Jan. 3, 1929, meeting, Caddell was told to see Wake Forest College President F.P. Gaines “about the filling station matter” and to speak to R.L. McMillan, a law professor, about the legal aspects of the matter. At this time, the town board was made up of Mayor Dr. Solomon P. Holding and three commissioners: W.R. Powell, a director of Royall Cotton Mill who also operated the company store, G.H. Greason, the cotton mill superintendent, and Dr. R.W. Wilkinson.
The board met again on Jan. 9 to hear McMillan give “a very instructive and entertaining talk about zoning” and law professor John G. Mills report on his conference with James H. Pou, the top lawyer in Wake County at the time, and Judge Mouring in Raleigh “in regard to abolishing the filling station.”
Zoning was very new. It had first begun in New York City in 1925. Durham, in 1927, was the first North Carolina city to adopt a zoning ordinance.
Wake Forest waited another 20 days, but it broke ground on Jan. 20 by becoming one of the first small towns in the state to adopt a zoning ordinance. Of course it was a very short one with only one provision – it became illegal to maintain or operate a gasoline filling station west of the railroad tracks. The board had to suspend the town’s charter to pass the ordinance quickly and it affected only Medlin.
The board also told Mills and Pou, both present, to make a test case and agreed to pay them $150.
Medlin apparently cooperated. He kept operating the filling station for a few days until he was charged, taken to court and fined $50. He appealed the verdict to the Supreme Court and the case was heard in the spring of 1930.
Representing the town were two firms: Pou and Pou, James H. and his son, from Raleigh and Mills and Mills, John G. Sr. and his son, from Wake Forest.
Medlin’s lawyers, Clyde A. Douglass and Robert N. Simms, were from Raleigh.
They lost, but not before Medlin received strong support from many of his neighbors, including the mayor, Dr. Holding. Solomon Holding is remembered in part because the town built a park on the site of his South Main Street home.
Medlin’s store was “the nicest in town,” Dr. Holding testified, denying any danger from the stored gasoline. Dr. Holding’s term as mayor had ended in May of 1929.
Dr. George Washington Paschal, who taught Greek and Latin at Wake Forest College, spoke for Medlin as did Dr. Needham Y. Gulley, a law professor.
Gulley said his home “is the nearest residence on the east side of Main Street to Mr. Medlin’s place of business. I live just across the pasture from Mr. John Mills.” The Mills home has since been torn down. Gulley’s statement meant he was living in the Royall-Miller house on East Juniper Avenue, a house built by Dr. William Royall in 1875 and where the professor of Greek lived until his death.
It was much later in the century before any kind of commercial activity began on North Main Street and it was entirely north of the tree-lined section with its median and large homes.
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In 2003:
Briner had a dream — but it was never built
When he purchased the 25-year-old Wake Forest Plaza last fall, Raleigh developer Craig Briner said the changes he planned would be “evolutionary, not revolutionary.”
Wrong.
The plans Briner described to a small crowd at the Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce Tuesday afternoon will revolutionize 20 acres in the heart of the town’s commercial district.
Briner and Raleigh architect Dan Huffman envision buildings two, three and four stories high circling a three-level parking deck. The buildings would house stores and perhaps offices in the first story with apartments and condominiums above. The largest, signature building at the corner of South White and East Elm – now the site of D&B auto sales – would be topped with a restaurant. “You could see all of the town,” Huffman said.
Just south of that building a pedestrian mall would lead from South White down to an amphitheater near the original plaza building.
That building will be totally changed in Huffman’s concept with the roof raised to allow for apartments or condos while underneath would be an upper-scale grocery store like Whole Foods or Fresh Market. To bring light into the apartments, the architects are planning a roof garden down the length of the building.
Although only a few of the buildings have been designed, the architects have gone into great detail on those they have drawn. Briner said the detail was necessary to demonstrate to the type of retailers he would like to attract – upscale food store Dean & Deluca was mentioned – how this “dense urban village” will differ from the usual development.
“Everyone wants to do raw land and single-family houses they can sell like that,” Briner said. “That’s not this vision.”
There will be arches covered with vines and flanked with trees leading into the different areas in the 20 acres. Huffman plans to build using tumbled brick and perhaps stone lintels to approximate the look and character of the buildings now in Wake Forest’s historic downtown. Canvas awnings, timber arches for the bridge, trellises over apartment balconies – “We wanted something that will fit in with the town,” Huffman said about his plans.
This will be a place to live, Briner said, with about 55 single-family homes and 110 apartments or condominiums. While the apartments will be above the stores or perhaps in a separate building, the single-family houses – Huffman called them courtyard homes – will be in the southeast corner of the tract, leading toward and connecting with Franklin Street.
The development will welcome families with children. There will be a children’s park in the center of the complex, Huffman said. “We think people will feel safer here than in the city.”
The streets in the single-family housing area will be planted with oaks on the side and in the medians. “I can see a canopy that will meet in the center and cover the entire street,” Huffman said. The streets will also have right-angle intersections to slow traffic.
The houses are planned to have a common wall that extends to the back of the lot to make a privacy fence. Briner said he wants to make the houses affordable, perhaps hovering in price around $200,000.
CVS leaving in April
The project has had some snags.
For one, Wake Technical Community College was all set to occupy the former Winn-Dixie space to consolidate all its northern Wake classes and programs under one roof while the first two buildings for its new northern campus are built. But then, Briner said, “the budget was cut and it didn’t happen.”
For another, one of the larger tenants, CVS drug store, plans to vacate next April, Briner said. The drug chain is reported to be planning a free-standing store at the corner of White and Roosevelt.
The leases for the rest of the tenants are short-term, Briner said.
He is much happier about the cooperation and help he has received from the town and the mayor in planning and arranging financing, including a plan new to North Carolina called tax increment financing. Under that, Briner said, the town can jumpstart the infrastructure spending such a development requires but will repay in taxes once built.
“Everything you see is not within code,” Briner said at the start. Like another developer, Andy Ammons, Briner apparently will be asking the town to change its codes and ordinances to allow a more visionary plan. The town planning staff is already working on ways to accommodate Ammons plans for a conservation subdivision on part of his reservoir tract.
This will be a multi-year process, Briner said. “I’m 50. I plan on owning this for a long time.” (Editor’s note: His company still owns a significant percentage of the original building.)
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