Wake Forest rightly calls itself an historic town and guardians, including town staff, make sure its historic structures are conserved and protected. Which is why the Wake Forest Fire Department had to abandon plans on Friday, July 17, to spend the morning and part of the afternoon on a controlled burn of a small white house at 446 Durham Road.
Senior Planner Michelle Michael saw the address and recognized it as one she had seen on a list of historic buildings. It took a few minutes to find it on the list for the Wake Forest Historic District that was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003 after a survey by archivists from the state Office of Archives and History. The district covers the historic core of the town centered on the rock-walled campus.
Because it is included in the historic district, even as a non-contributing resource, Michael said, a certificate of appropriateness is required for demolition from the town’s Historic Preservation Commission, which will meet on Aug. 12. Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary owns the house – it recently purchased all the Paschal property – and has submitted an application for a certificate for the demolition.
After that, Chief Ron Early and his volunteer and paid firefighters can schedule another controlled burn for training.
“The house at 446 Durham Road was built in the 1940s as a rental house,” Michael said in an email, and probably was built during the local housing shortage after World War II when enrollment at Wake Forest College ballooned thanks to all the veterans attending college on the GI Bill.
It is likely the small house was built by Professor G.W. Paschal and rented to college students at first, to others in later years. The rusticated white concrete block house he built for his large family stands just to the east, next to the impressive stone house where Seminary President Daniel Akin and his family live. The seminary is now renovating the Paschal house, which has been empty for several years, and Ryan Hutchinson, the seminary’s executive vice president for operations, and his family will live there.
The town has four historic districts and four designated historic landmark homes. The town designated North Main Street and some surrounding streets as a local historic district in 1979. The three National Register districts are the Glen Royall Mill Village, which was listed in 1999; the Downtown Historic District along South White Street was listed in 2002; and the Wake Forest Historic District went on the list in 2003.
The landmark properties are the I.O. Jones House, built in 1903, on South Main Street; the Battle-Purnell House, built in 1802-03, outside the town limits on North Main Street; Oakforest, also outside town limits and off Ligon Mill Road, was built in 1807 and added to in 1865; and the Purefoy-Chappell House on South Main Street was begun in 1838, added to in 1895 and added to again in 1974.
