(A chance meeting reminded us again that in our growing town new residents do not know the history of the area, Wake Forest College, and the town which grew up around it. This and future historical articles are one effort to fill that gap; the editor also urges all area residents to visit the Wake Forest Historical Museum on North Main Street which has wonderful exhibits about the college, the town and the area.)
It was the 1932, the great Depression stalked the land, there was little work at local cotton mills and the price for cotton had hit bottom. The town commissioners had asked the Wake Forest College trustees to help with two great needs. The first plea was, “owing to the second local bank failure and the long discontinuance of work in industry here” to allow 20 young women who had just graduated from high school to enroll in the college for the 1932-1933 year. The request was denied.
The second was for a good fire engine for the town because the only equipment the Wake Forest Fire Department, established in 1921, had beyond some extra hose and two hand-pulled hose reels was an old Westcott automobile that had been converted into a chemical and hose wagon in 1926. That too was denied.
Then came the fires.
The first to burn was the oldest building on the Wake Forest College campus, Wait Hall. The fire was started under the roof of the middle section, and was already filling the central part of the building and the stairs with smoke when discovered about 2:30 or 3 the morning of May 5, 1934.
There were a number of students living in the old College Hall, and most were able to escape down the stairs but two shimmied down a rope from the fourth floor, a rope that had been left there for just such an eventuality.
The Wake Forest Fire Department called to Raleigh, Louisburg, Henderson and Franklinton for help, but even those departments were unable to do more than watch and, as the “Old Gold & Black,” the student newspaper and the only newspaper in town at the time, reported, hold the flames in check enough to prevent them from burning beyond the rooms on the second floor.
There was a poignant moment in the morning when the melted ruins of the college bell, which had not only summoned the young men to classes but had tolled the hours for farmers and housewives in the area around, 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.”
College President Kitchin’s office was destroyed with many records, though many other records were saved. The caps and gowns for the past graduations and the graduation within a few days were gone.
It left a strange emptiness at the top of the hill where once Dr. Calvin Jones’ house stood to be replaced in 1838 by Wait Hall. Now the gap was flanked by only Wingate Memorial Hall to the south and the college library to the north.
The college reporters and editors had already left and there was no edition of the “Old Gold & Black” to record the second major fire that spring. In the early morning of May 31, 1933, fire destroyed the new high school building on West Sycamore Avenue. The first high school in town, it had just been completed and was the object of great local pride. And at the time it did not have any electrical connections.
Because it had been fully insured, it was quickly rebuilt with the same plans and is now the Forrest Building at Wake Forest Elementary School.
By that time, there was widespread fear and suspicion though none of that had found its way into the pages of the student newspaper.
“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.
“We would go out about two o’clock every night to check on the house,” Arrington said.
“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. recalled. His father was the college registrar, and his office had been in Wait Hall. In those two years, Patterson said, his father and other men would sit up at night with a gun on their knees, keeping watch on the house while the family slept.
The late Leland Jones, a volunteer 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.
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.
An anonymous article published many years after these events by a former student confirmed that students were very suspicious and formed informal watch groups. This student even chased one fellow student across campus one night without being able to absolutely identify him.
Paschal, however, blamed the major fires on carelessness or spontaneous combustion.
You can still find the fire scars on a 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.”
That fire destroyed most of the band instruments as well as irreplaceable portraits of former college presidents and benefactors.
“This is the third time in ten months that an educational building has been ravaged by flames,” the “Old Gold & Black” said on Feb. 17.
The following week there was an article which said the latest fire and other incidents “authenticated” the belief in a “fire-bug” and was the first time arson as the cause for the fires was discussed in print.
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.
“Fire But Still Trying To Burn Up Wake Forest,” the headline in the “Old Gold & Black” said on March 5, leading to an article about the bloodhounds that were brought in to try to track the arsonist. Twice the hounds followed a scent from the Golf House in an indirect path to Hunter Dormitory where many believed the suspect student lived, but there were no arrests.
The final campus fire was discovered in a pile of rubbish in the Alumni Building.
The suspect student left school later that spring and the fires stopped.
The college, still strapped for cash as it set about replacing Wait Hall and Wingate Memorial Hall, found enough to pay half of the cost of a new fire engine for the town. It was a 400-gallon pumper on a Chevrolet body and for some reason it was named Maude.
