Happening at the museum

‘Cue Done to a Turn

By Jennifer Smart, Assistant Director

The Wake Forest Historical Museum

This headline about the Town of Wake Forest ran in the News & Observer a little more than a century ago, praising the menu at a local event of epic proportions. It was August 5, 1909, and planners had turned the campus of Wake Forest College into a vast, community-wide picnic. This was only the latest in a series of such celebrations. The parties were held each year and designed to attract everyone in town: merchants, carpenters, manufacturers, clerks, farmers, and even the college president. Senior citizens were the guests of honor. Children scampered across the grounds. And this time around, North Carolina Governor William Walton Kitchen, who’d graduated from Wake Forest in 1884, also was in attendance.

All that’s well and good, but the best part of the article is the peek it gives into our town’s progress. Wake Forest was growing by leaps and bounds in the first decade of the twentieth century. In just one year, the U.S. Census of 1910 would count 1,443 residents. In fact, on the very day the picnic took place workers were installing the town’s first electric light system. Royall Cotton Mill was producing yarn and cloth. The Wake Forest Foundry was manufacturing plows to be sold across the region. And the Wake Forest cotton market offered farmers the best prices across several counties, so they came here to market their crops from miles around.

If you’re the sort of person who likes to spend time searching the stories on Newspapers.com, you’re probably aware there wasn’t much else happening in Wake Forest a hundred years ago. Virtually nothing in terms of crime, graft, conflict, or other explosive events. In those days, the News & Observer checked in periodically just to take the town’s temperature.

That’s why another article, appearing on April 19, 1917, again touched on growth, citizenry, and the way of life. This one praised our locale as “Thrifty Wake Forest,” and went on to call the place quaint and homely. I think the editor meant homey—as the article refers to Wake Forest one of the most attractive towns in the state.

“Unfortunately, the town does not show from the railroad, and travelers passing through cannot comprehend what a restful old place is sheltered under the trees that line the streets higher up the slope, nor what homey places are back of the long avenues of those dignified old trees that stretch away like regiments of soldiers at dress parade waiting the command for something of more active life.”

Wake Forest has always been famous for its trees. This later article also pointed out the community’s broader ambitions, identifying a progressive bent when it came to attracting opportunity. Town leaders, reluctant to rely solely on Wake Forest College for jobs, were actively pursuing industry. By the time the piece was written, Royall Cotton Mill had grown to include 300 employees doing textile manufacturing work and living with their families in the mill village at the north end of Faculty Avenue. The mill’s presence brought important economic diversification to Wake Forest, as did that old stalwart, agriculture. The need for more of it received a full paragraph of newsprint in this piece, along with a plea for additional people to move in.

“The country is one of the best farming sections of the state. Like most country places, more people are needed to utilize the possibilities. The range of production is large. Cotton, tobacco, grain, livestock, fruit, all of them possible in a high degree of perfection…. Eastern Wake and western Franklin could sustain an empire. Dairy cattle, beef cattle, hogs, poultry, and undoubtedly sheep could make this neighborhood look like a transported county from England. All that is lacking is population to use the incomprehensible resources from nature. Good soil, good water and lots of it, good climate, good neighbors, good towns, good everything but a good report from the census taker when he comes around.”

Interesting analysis, and quite on point—apart from the line that any place which consistently hits the upper 90s could possibly be mistaken for England. When the census taker did come around in 1920, he counted 1,425 residents—18 fewer than ten years before. So it’s clear the community wasn’t growing any longer, at least not at an impressive rate.

Of course, we’ve more than made up for that as we head into the year of the 2020 U.S. Census. When reading these century-old articles it’s hard not to wonder what the town’s past residents would think of us today, with our 45,000 citizens, traffic, subdivisions, greenways, highways, schools—and no Wake Forest College.

(The Wake Forest Historical Museum, 919-556-2911, is at 414 North Main Street, Wake Forest. Admission is free. The museum is open from 10 to 12 and from 1:30 to 4:30 Tuesday through Friday, and from 2 to 5 on Sundays if there are volunteers to staff it.)

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