100 years of history
Life in Wake Forest was lived at much more measured pace in the 1940s. Yes, young Army officers may have been marching at double-time around the campus now that the Army Finance School filled the college classrooms that almost emptied after Pearl Harbor. Yes, other young men and women were also going off to war and to places like Norfolk where the bustle of war generated jobs.
But in Wake Forest a shopping trip to Raleigh usually meant a trip to and from in a Seaboard Coastline railroad car. Men could commute to their downtown Raleigh offices by rail. Raleigh was 25 miles away, the highway was two-lane U.S. 1 that came through town, right down Faculty Avenue, around the east side of the campus, down South Main Street and Forestville. Gasoline, like most other goods, was strictly rationed for the duration of the war.
Both the highway and the Seaboard Coastline tracks were busy transporting the necessary war material like tanks and Jeeps and guns. North Main Street homes between the highway and the tracks had a front row seat to what war on the home front meant.
After the war, the federal government rebuilt U.S. 1 to the west of town despite protests from town government and residents, but it was still just two lanes.
In the downtown grocery stores, you could still get a fresh chicken, killed, drawn and plucked while you waited, and a clerk pulled the cans from the shelves as you read your list. Every housewife struggled with the intricacies of rationing and its coupons and stamps.
Many people in town still kept cows or bought milk from the local dairy farms. They had to make their own butter or make do with the wartime white oleo with its orange coloring capsule.
Radio brought the news about the war and about events across the nation and the state, but any local news traveled along the grapevine or was noted in the college newspaper, The Old Gold and Black. There was no local newspaper, and the town commissioners met in secret unless a delegation or individual asked to address them. If the town commissioners took any action that needed to be made public, a notice was posted on a board at town hall. Election results were also posted there.
Town hall was the two-story grey building at the corner of Brooks and East Owen that now houses the town’s planning and inspections department. Town government was housed downstairs; upstairs, Judge Donald Gulley presided over Recorder’s Court for Wake Forest and New Light townships.
Peter Jones began publishing The Farm and Home Journal, a tabloid-sized weekly publication, in 1947. In 1950 Sybil Gulley, who was married to the judge, and Mrs. C.S. Black, whose husband was a former town commissioner, purchased the newspaper and changed its name to The Wake Weekly. They would in turn sell it to William Allen, who later sold it to his brother, R.W. (Bob) Allen. In 1950, the town board minutes noted that a summary of the town budget would be published in The Wake Weekly.
The town and cows got together, in a way, several times during the 1940s. Both R.W. Wilkinson and W.W. Holding went to the commissioners to complain that sewage from the town’s system had overflowed into their pastures. Wilkinson said his cow was killed; Holding lost a hog.
Mrs. William Hicks received $25 from the commissioners in 1940 as payment for a cow she said had been electrocuted by a town power line, but at the next meeting the commissioners rescinded the payment without an explanation.
(This was first published May 5, 2004)
###
