On Sept. 11 back in 2003
This is a regular feature about Wake Forest in 2003 when the Wake Forest Gazette began publication.
Golfing great Arnold Palmer will be in Wake Forest Wednesday, Sept. 17, to dedicate the high school and college sports paraphernalia collection at the Wake Forest College Birthplace Museum.
When the museum builds its annex, the balls, bats, clubs and uniforms will be known as the Arnold Palmer Sports Collection. It is now housed in one room and a hall in the old Calvin Jones House.
Palmer is the “most well-known world-wide figure in 50 years” connected with Wake Forest College, now University, Birthplace President Susan Brinkley said, and she expects a large crowd, including several of Palmer’s fellow college athletes.
Brinkley said the schedule that day includes some private time for Palmer to meet with friends and classmates. The public ceremony will be at 3 p.m. at the museum on North Main Street and should last about 45 minutes, but Palmer will stay at the museum until 5, meeting people, shaking hands and signing autographs. “He’s very crowd-friendly,” Brinkley said.
There will be some chairs available, Brinkley said, but she cautioned that people may want to bring their own.
Two people who will be close to Palmer in that crowd will be Betty Frankow of Youngsville and Margaret Wineinger of Raleigh. Their mother, Helen Saintsing Johnston, rented rooms in the South Brick House on South Avenue to college boys, including Palmer, and their brother, John, was the college golf coach.
“Buddy and Arnie, they were just like brothers to me,” Frankow said this week. Buddy was Marvin “Buddy” Worsham, who grew up with Palmer in LaTrobe, Pa., and came to Wake Forest with him. “We (roller) skated, played cards, listened to the radio, talked. We just had a good time together.
“Those two and myself, we got along well real. It was just like having two brothers a little bit older than myself.” Frankow, the youngest in her family, was in high school at the time.
Even her dog, John Marvin, reminds her of those days. The John is for her brother and Marvin is for Worsham.
Frankow said there were five college athletes living in that house her mother rented, two basketball players and three golfers. “We had boys living in our house other places, too.”
After Worsham was killed in an auto accident in 1950, Palmer withdrew from college in his senior year and enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard for a three-year hitch. He briefly returned to Wake Forest in 1954 when he won the U.S. Amateur championship. He turned professional shortly after that and went on to make golfing history, including 92 championships.
Among many other awards, honorary degrees and business successes, Palmer was named Athlete of the Decade for the 1960s in a national Associated Press poll. He has been heavily involved in many charitable efforts, including honorary national chairman of the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation for 20 years. He played a major role in the fund-raising to create the Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Women in Orlando, Fla. He and his wife, Winnie, live near Orlando, and one daughter, Amy, lives nearby.
The Palmers’ other daughter, Peggy Wears, lives in Durham, and Palmer will be staying with her.
Palmer will be playing in the SAS Senior Golf Tournament in Cary that begins Thursday. Brinkley said at first she though Palmer was just coming to Wake Forest as an afterthought since he was playing in the tournament, but a friend of Palmer said no. Palmer had planned to come to Wake Forest and decided to play in the tournament since he would be nearby.
Brinkley also said the Birthplace Society had different plans originally for Palmer’s visit. Early this spring, they wanted him to turn the first shovel of dirt for the museum annex. “Our original intent was to get him here to honor him,” Brinkley said, but the ground-breaking was on the agenda.
Instead of a ground-breaking, the society members will have brochures and a model of the planned annex. Fund-raising and construction are on hold because neighbors have filed an appeal in Wake County Superior Court, saying the Wake Forest Board of Adjustment erred in upholding the Historic Preservation Commission’s approval for the annex. No date has yet been set for a hearing on that appeal.
Also, the residential zoning district along North Main Street does not allow museums. The Calvin Jones House was on its 4.5-acre site before the town drew that zoning district and was therefore grandfathered in. The Birthplace Society is asking for a change in the zoning district text to allow museums, and that request may be heard at the planning board’s October meeting.
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Historic Thompson House to be moved, making way for Bay Leaf Baptist Church on Falls Road
Tuesday morning the Wake County Board of Adjustment approved the special use application for Bay Leaf Baptist Church to construct a one-story sanctuary and education building and 231-car parking lot on Falls of the Neuse Road just south of its intersection with Old N.C. 98.
Last October the county board turned down the church’s plans for a three-story parking garage and church building on the 19-acre site because neighbors in the adjacent Wakefield Plantation subdivision objected to the parking garage.
This time Susan Barham, a one-woman force for historic preservation in the area, argued against the special use permit because of the history associated with the house that stands on the tract.
That is the Greek Revival William Thompson house, built in 1826 or 1836. The church made no mention of the house in its application and at the hearing a church representative said there was already a contract to have the house moved. Originally the church had planned to have it either razed or deconstructed.
Tuesday afternoon Wake Forest attorney Kathryn Drake said she had just come from dropping off a contract and a check to Will Gatlin, associate pastor at Bay Leaf. Drake said there was no need to complete the contract, which had been under discussion for months, until the church received the permit.
“They are giving me the house. I’m buying two acres of land in the back,” Drake said. The two acres for the new house site are on Old N.C. 98 just before it dead-ends into Falls Lake. The state’s Historic Preservation Office has agreed the house will remain eligible for the National Register of Historic Places despite the move.
“We were going to do this a year ago (move the house), but then they didn’t get their special use permit,” Drake said. The mover has assured her it will be an easy move, that a mirror propped against the wall will not move while he eases the house around the corner and down the hill. The move will not take place for two or three months.
“We love new projects,” Drake said of herself and her husband, Frank, also an attorney. They have renovated their home on North Main Street. “The nice thing about this is I don’t have to live in it. I can go home and take a shower.”
Drake said the house should be ready for the Wake Forest Christmas Tour in 2004, providing they are still the owners. If it has sold, the new owners must agree.
Speaking of new owners, she is ready to sell the house at any stage of renovation, which will begin with rebuilding the brick foundation and four chimneys. The house’s wide heart pine floors and plaster walls are worn with the years but in good shape.
It was Barham who spurred the effort to save the house. “We need to thank her publicly,” Drake said. Barham called people in the area with old homes and with an interest in preserving history, and a small group that included the Drakes began meeting more than two years ago. Although there were a few options, the only viable one in the end was moving the house.
It is believed George Warren Thompson, who was connected to many local families, built the house and possibly built it to continue Forest Hill Academy. The academy, the first school incorporated in the Forest District, as the area was known then, opened in 1818 near Dr. Calvin Jones house. It was said to be 15 miles north of Raleigh on the old Oxford Road that crossed the Neuse River at Jesse Powell’s bridge.
In 1834, Thompson, along with his father-in-law, William Crenshaw, the Rev. John Purefoy and William Roles, the founder of Rolesville, were some of the incorporators and initial trustees for Wake Forest College. Thompson continued as a trustee for the school until he died in 1892. After the college opened, Forest Hill Academy became a preparatory school for young men who planned to enter the college. Thompson may have lived there with his wife and their three children. It was their older son, William Marcellus Thompson, who owned the house and gave it his name before he was killed in the battle of Gaines Mill in Virginia in 1862. His widow drove a wagon to the battle site to recover his body and bring it home for burial. The house remained in the Thompson family until 1945.
The new sanctuary will be the home for a second congregation for the church which has its original building on Bayleaf Road north of Raleigh. That second Bay Leaf Baptist Church congregation meets at Wakefield High School now.
Although the church’s 19 acres now front on Falls Road, that road is destined to become a dead end after construction on and around the N.C. 98 bypass is complete. State Department of Transportation plans call for Falls to be straightened to meet the southern end of Thompson Mill Road.
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Town could regulate flea markets and yard sales
Although the motivation – an ongoing sale in a yard along Durham Road – has since closed up shop, the Wake Forest commissioners will consider regulating yard sales and flea markets when they meet Tuesday, Sept. 16, at 7 p.m.
Town attorney Eric Vernon surveyed applicable ordinances from Dunn to Charlotte and all over Wake County and found Winston-Salem’s simple ordinance “would likely be the most appropriate way to regulate yard sales in Wake Forest.”
Town residents would be limited to two yard or garage sales each year, both less than three days in length. The sales would have to take place in daylight and would be restricted to residential household items, not items purchased for resale.
North Wake Baptist Church is asking to be exempted from a town policy which would require it to provide half of a five-lane cross section on its land along South Main Street. The town’s transportation plan that was approved this spring has as its number-one priority the widening of South Main to five lanes with sidewalks on both sides from the N.C. 98 bypass to Capital Boulevard.
The church purchased the Pettigrew-Baum property next door on the south side a couple years ago and has been drawing up plans to build a sanctuary there. The church worked with the town and the state Department of Transportation through 2002 and provided the right-of-way for the then-current plans for the N.C. 98 bypass and future widening of the street.
A letter from Jim Compton with the church says that in August of last year the church was assured it would not have to provide any additional land to widen the street beyond that already agreed on. On July 30 of this year the church was told the town would require widening to the five-lane, two-sidewalk width. The estimated cost to the church is $22,346.
Planning Director Chip Russell will present a suggested action at the board meeting.
In other items on the agenda, the board will
- hear a presentation by Friends of Wake County – and perhaps by a school board representative – about support for the school and library bond issues on the Oct. 7 ballot.
- hold a public hearing about annexing 64 acres in the 9300 block of Ligon Mill Road, land owned by D.R. Horton that will shortly become a subdivision called Margo’s Pond.
- appoint three people to fill unexpired terms on the Historic Preservation Commission and one person to fill an unexpired term on the Recreation Advisory Board.
- approve or deny two rezoning requests recommended by the planning board: Wayne Gibson’s request to rezone half an acre on Burlington Mill Road to highway business and Bass, Nixon and Kennedy’s request to rezone 5.3 acres along South Main Street to neighborhood business.
- consider submitting an application for a new historic district.
- consider setting priorities under the Wake County Growth Management strategy.
- approve an agreement under which Franklin County will collect the town property taxes for the town for that part of the Richland Hills subdivision which lies in Franklin County.
- consider an amendment to the personnel policy for Worker’s Compensation to include auxiliary police officer.
- approve change orders for the waterline improvements along South Main and North Taylor streets.
- approve an oversized waterline agreement for Hope Lutheran Church in Heritage.
- consider covering the parking signs in the downtown area all day on the second Friday of each month when Art After Hours and Moonlight Madness are held.
- consider closing part of Lonesome Spur in Carriage Run subdivision on Saturday, Oct. 4, for the neighborhood’s annual barbecue.
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