100 years of history — by Carol W. Pelosi
The years 1933 and 1934 stand out in Wake Forest history because of the terrible fires.
“It seemed that everything in town was burning up, including the building in which my father’s office was located at the college,” Grady S. Patterson Jr. recalls. His father was the college registrar, and the fire that consumed his father’s office was the first one.
It was in the early morning hours of May 5, 1933, when a fire began in the central portion of the old College Building (Wait Hall). It had already destroyed the stairs and much of the first and second floors housing offices and classrooms when discovered.
Because of the peculiar construction of the building, the fire spread less quickly to the wings which were student dormitories. The young men were able to save themselves and most of the belongings.
The alarm spread quickly, and most of the town’s inhabitants along with the college faculty and students stood and watched as the fire destroyed the oldest campus building along with irreplaceable college records.
Trucks and firemen were called from Raleigh and Louisburg to help the local firemen, but there was little they could do.
A poignant moment came the next morning, when the molten ruins of the college bell, the tocsin that tolled the class hours, was found in the smoldering ashes. “Many thought it had the sweetest and at the same time the strongest and most commanding tone of all the bells in the world,” Dr. George Washington Paschal wrote in his “History of Wake Forest College.”
“It was an eerie time,” the late Tom Arrington said in 1982, recalling those two years. Arrington was the son of the first town fire chief and later a fire chief himself.
“We would go out about two o’clock every night to check on the house,” Arrington said.
The late Leland Jones, also a fireman at the time, remembered expecting a fire call every night. Men organized themselves into all-night guard units to protect their homes.
Arrington, like everyone else in town, was convinced there was a “fire bug,” an arsonist, and that he was a student. Investigators were brought in from other states, he said, and one even pretended to enroll as a student and roomed with the suspect.
Paschal, however, blamed the major fires on carelessness or spontaneous combustion.
Arrington said over 70 fires were set over the two-year period, and 17 buildings were burned. Every building on campus had a fire set in it, but most were saved.
You can still find the fire scars at the Chandley house on West Pine. Arrington said it was then a fraternity house and was apparently singled out after the fraternity members published a list of all the fire boxes and their locations. (Before the widespread use of telephones, the town used a system of fire boxes to sound the alarm.) The house was set on fire only a few nights after the list was published, Arrington said, but it was discovered in time to save the house.
In the winter and spring of 1934, the arsonist – if there was one – struck again and again.
Wingate Memorial Hall was destroyed on Feb. 14, 1934. “The fire started at the southern end where there was a staircase connecting the chapel above to the physics laboratory below,” Paschal reported. “The second story was already a sea of flames when the fire was first discovered.”
Soon afterward, a fire was discovered in the toilet in the central section of Hunter Dormitory. About the same time, the Golf House, a wooden building on the south side of the Durham highway just outside the town limits, burned to the ground one night about two o’clock.
There was another fire off campus. The night of May 31, 1934, fire destroyed the new high school building on West Sycamore Avenue. The first high school in town, housing grades one through 12, it had been the object of great local pride. The annual meetings of Wake Electric were held in the auditorium with its stage. The building was soon rebuilt on the same site with the same plans and is now the Forrest Building at Wake Forest Elementary.
Because of the fire, “The elementary school classes were held that year in the basement of Wake Forest Baptist Church,” Patterson, along with others like Horace Macon, recalled.
The final fire was discovered on the first floor of the Alumni Building, started in a pile of rubbish.
The suspect student left school later that spring, and the fires stopped.
Two years earlier, the town fathers had tried to interest the college in paying part of the cost of a new fire truck. The college was as strapped for money as everyone else in those lean years and declined. But after the fires and still unsure whether they would continue, in October of 1934 the college agreed to pay half the cost of a 400-gallon pumper on a Chevrolet body. It was named Maude.
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