100 years of history
The 1920 Census found that more people lived in towns than on farms for the first time in the nation’s history.
In that year, Prohibition began and women won the right to vote.
There was prosperity, but agricultural prices were falling.
As the decade progressed, there was the Teapot Dome scandal, the Scopes trial in Tennessee and Ford roadsters selling for $260, while the bootlegging industry was estimated at $3.6 billion.
Henry Ford revolutionized the workweek, introducing the eight-hour day and five-day week.
The mechanical cotton picker was invented, Mount Rushmore was begun and Lindbergh flew to Paris. It was a dizzy time for the stock market and for the economy across the nation.
In Wake Forest, the local economy centered on Royall Cotton Mill just outside the town limits to the north, the college on its central campus and the farmers all around town.
There were large plantation farms with tenants, relics of pre-Civil War days, and small farms.
Although it had been 30 years or more since Priestley Mangum introduced the Mangum Terrace to control hillside erosion and demonstrated it on his farm northwest of town, Greenfields, many fields in the area were badly eroded.
Intensive cotton cultivation had leached the nutrients from the soil, and in 1927 the boll weevil reached Wake County, wrecking the cotton economy.
It was a good time to buy wornout farmland. Durham banker John Sprunt Hill purchased some of those small farms along the road leading up from Falls, bought the old Gill house, called the assemblage Wakefield Farm and hired Samuel Oscar Rich to build an eye-stopping showplace of a barn to house his herd of blue-ribbon cows.
Around the same time, W.W. Holding Jr., a Wake Forest cotton broker and county commissioner who was later instrumental in establishing Wake Technical College, was assembling two or three farms into one large dairy farm just east of Forestville. Friendship Chapel Baptist Church had its building and cemetery near the site for the barns, so Holding gave the church land nearer the railroad for a new brick building.
The farmers came to town to buy seed in the spring and staples like flour, sugar, coffee and tea all year long – all on credit until the crops came in and they could pay local merchants like S.W. Brewer.
But farmers had no part of the town’s social life or government. Those were controlled by the college and the merchants. For example, in 1925 the town board consisted of Mayor A.J. Davis and F.W. Dickson, both merchants; Dr. J.H. Gorrell, a faculty member; Dr. E.W. Timberlake Jr., dean of the college and son of a college trustee; and W.R. Powell, who worked in the family business, the Royall Cotton Mill.
Davis and Dickson, who was the town treasurer, were each paid $25 a month for their service, and Dickson was later paid by the town for acting as clerk of the Recorders Court and other duties. All five men had homes on Faculty Avenue that still bear their names as well as the names of later owners.
In 1921 the town had undertaken a number of large public works, building a water system and sewer lines and paving streets. In addition the town was still paying off the bonds for the electric system. It would be years before the total indebtedness would be spelled out in the town board minutes.
In those days the town’s budget was about $9,000, and in 1925-29 property taxes were $1.50 per $100. Less than a third of that, 36 cents, went into the general fund for current expenses. The rest was needed for the various sinking funds to pay the debts.
Reading the minutes years later, the commissioners seemed to exhibit a curiously laissaz-faire attitude toward money. The fiscal year was jiggled all over the calendar, and at least once the commissioners set the tax rate before looking at the town’s needs or assembling a budget.
The same devil-take-the-hindmost attitude was on display at the cotton mill. “During the years 1921 to 1927, the mill leaked liquid assets like a cracked pitcher,” Don Johnston Jr. wrote in 1945 for an unpublished history of the mill.
Johnston’s father married Petronia Powell and was to manage the mill through receivership in the early 1930s and up through the mid-1940s. “Dividends of 46 percent were paid, bleeding the mill until it was face-to-face with receivership.” Salaries paid to the mill’s executives were as much as $7,500 at a time when highly respected faculty members were paid $3,300.
Wake Forest College had a healthy endowment and its largest enrollment ever. It also had what turned into a private bank, the Denmark Student Aid Fund which Dr. Gorrell administered. The fund had been set up to help needy students.
The town dipped into the fund for some short-term loans, and the mill used it so frequently and so lavishly that the debt owed by the mill reached $10,000. Although the mill paid 6 percent interest, the college effectively held an unprotected interest in the mill.
Families connected to the mill could make deposits into the fund to be credited against the debt, but the fund (and Dr. Gorrell) also made substantial loans to those same families. In his history, Johnston said over $43,000 was loaned in just one case and most of the loans were never repaid by the people involved.
It was 1945, Johnston said, when “an individual connected with the mill” made a gift to the college that more than repaid the money borrowed from the Denmark Fund. (The conclusion seems to be that the “individual” was Don P. Johnston Sr. who, before he severed his connection with the mill, had begun his own cotton brokering business and had proved himself an astute and moral businessman.)
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In 2003, Jeff Ammons purchased the old Athey plant, names it The Factory
A year after Jeff Ammons took to heart the message on the for-sale sign, “Be creative,” he turned that vision to action on Sept. 4, purchasing the former Athey Products plant on South Main Street for $4.4 million.
From now on it will be known as The Factory although the Sports Factory was once considered for the name as was the Entertainment and Sports Factory.
Ammons said he waited until he had completed the leasing before he made the commitment final.
And he has a stellar lineup of tenants, starting with the food vendors.
The Armadillo Grill and the Village Deli will share a new building in front of the old manufacturing plant.
Just inside the door, there will be a pizza restaurant with a terrace for outdoor dining.
On the other side as you enter, Goodberry’s will scoop up frozen treats.
Baby Sweet Pea, a children’s clothing store, and Works of Clay, a participatory pottery shop, will also be in the front part of the building.
Along the side of the building, there is a large space for a fitness center and in the back of the building and along the other side will be space for a ballet school, music lessons, a pro shop for sports equipment, gymnastics, an indoor soccer field and two basketball courts. There are a few smaller areas still available for lease.
The tenant with the most space, two full-sized hockey and ice-skating rinks, will probably be the last to open for business, Ammons said last week, because he will want to open in the fall of next year when hockey and ice-skating season begins.
There will be four entrances to the sports and recreation facility from the various parking areas.
He does not believe there will be any visible work on the building for at least a month or so because he still has to obtain a building permit from the town. The different venues will open as the tenants complete their remodeling/renovation, Ammons said. “I would like to open early next spring, but it will probably be July or August before everything is open.”
In the past, when Athey produced street sweepers, one of them was often positioned in front of the building and spotlighted at night.
In the future, Ammons plans a water feature with sculptural figures at the entrance to the building.
Ammons has also applied for a county grant of $1.5 million to build a youth baseball complex on vacant land behind the factory. Last week, he said that application was still being considered – at least he had not been told no – but he had no other information.
Jeff, the younger brother of Heritage Wake Forest developer Andy Ammons, is the president of Ammons Building Corporation. He lives near Falls Lake with his wife and two young daughters.
Athey was once a leading industry
Athey began in Wake Forest in 1965 at a time the town was soliciting industry to take up the economic slack caused when Wake Forest College moved to Winston-Salem. At one point, the street sweeper manufacturer had 310 employees, and in 1995 had $40 million in sales.
That was a high point. Between 1995 and 2000, the company went through difficult times and kept reducing the number of employees. Finally, on Dec. 1, 2000, most of the workforce, 125 people, were suddenly laid off, leaving only 32 people on the payroll. Although a few people were called back, Athey closed its doors in June of 2001 and declared bankruptcy.
The winning bidder for Athey Products was Five Star, which paid $12.301 million for the company where most of its management had once worked. Five Star, which is in Youngsville, had been formed in 1996 by several former Athey employees. The company was later purchased by Federal Signal Environmental Product Group, a company which owns Elgin Sweeper, another Athey competitor.
Wake Forest developer Jim Adams and his partner, Jim Goldston, purchased the building and 38 acres early in 2001. They named it the 1839 Grandmark Center and planned to build a commercial park there. Last year Adams would not say what they had paid.
In 1999, before Wake County revaluated its property and before Athey went bust, the plant and land were listed as number three among the top 50 taxpayers in Wake Forest. KF-US1 LLC, the corporation which owns Caveness Farms apartments, and Weavexx were number one and two. Athey was listed as having an assessed value of $6.8 million.
By 2002, the land and plant now owned by 1839 Development LLC had dropped to number 25 and had an assessed value of $3.6 million. The plant had been stripped of all equipment by then.
As a sidelight, Heritage Wake Forest had the highest assessed property value in town at $17.5 million in 2002. Weavexx, which will end its Wake Forest operations this fall, was number two at $15.4 million assessed value for the plant and number 32 for the $2.5 million value of the property owned by Weavexx Corporate. In 2002, Home Depot’s property was assessed at $6.2 million, and Target’s property at $3.4 million.
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