Happening at the museum

Griping is not new

By Jennifer Smart, Assistant Director

The Wake Forest Historical Museum

Public griping in Wake Forest has a long and illustrious history. I like to think this shows how deeply we care about our community. Before Facebook or Nextdoor, residents wrote letters to the local newspaper or—as this was a college community—the campus literary magazine. You can take today’s problems, rewind them, and see exactly what Wake Forest citizens were worried about in decades past.

I have to say the quality of the insults is impressive. These complainers were not amateurs, and they filled their letters with details. For that reason, they give historians a more realistic view of the good old days. One of the best examples is a missive titled “Things Municipal” that appeared in the Wake Forest Student in 1913.

“Here are some of the things that Wake Forest has: two banks, a cotton mill, two iron foundries, three lumber mills, a number of department stores, two drug stores, hardware stores and grocery stores, with many other firms doing miscellaneous kinds of business. Here are some things Wake Forest does not have: a decent public school or public school building; a single foot of paved sidewalk or a well-kept street, with the exception of a few yards of Faculty Avenue; a system of sanitation; an adequate hotel.

During bad weather it is nearly impossible to reach the business side of town on account of muddy streets and sidewalks. Even in front of the department stores and shoe stores there are mudholes in the walk. Maybe the shoe man knew his business when he established his store behind a mudhole. One could fall out of the uneven, steep streets, over embankments, into the grocery stores.

No pretension is made to neatness and sanitation. From morning till night, every day of the week and Sunday too, chicken coops grace the entrance to the grocery stores. And the narrow streets and alleys are filled with rubbish. I venture to say that if the college campus and Faculty Avenue were taken away, not much town beauty would be left.

Why can’t the town have some pride and clean up? There is plenty of wealth that can be taxed. Besides all of this, Wake Forest is a trading center of the county for miles around and is the largest town in Wake besides Raleigh.”

It’s a thorough takedown, and a couple of things stand out. First, let’s give three cheers for how far we’ve come! Second, the problem of muddy streets is one of the most frequently seen criticisms of life in town during the early 20^th century. Evidently, mud and rain have always plagued Wake Forest. Here’s another interesting document addressing the same issue. In 1924, the Old Gold & Black published a tongue-in-cheek article in praise of mud.

“There is never enough mud in the town. Therefore, we need more mud. Then in this age of cooperation, why not organize a Cooperative Mud Association for the town?

The object of the association would be to provide mud for a depth of six inches on Main Street, beginning at the Texaco Oil Company’s tank in the western part of town and running east to the intersection of the Rolesville road at the corner of Wilkinson’s store. Thence southward to the intersection with the campus road.

It would be required that the mud be of a mixture that does not easily undergo evaporation and that it be red mud. There are, I suppose, individual tastes in mud as in everything else. But I believe that red would be preferable to the majority, or I would not have named it.

It might also be added that the depth of the mud might be increased with profit to a depth of nine inches at crossings most used by pedestrians—say from the sidewalk in front of the Standard Company to the sidewalk in front of the Bank of Wake.

Some 600 students—not to mention voting citizens—use this particular passage each day, and just picture to yourself, if you can, the pleasure, the delight, the abandon experienced by these pedestrians ‘socking’ their feet into the pliant, plastic stuff, and then pulling them out with that peculiar sucking sound which shows that one of nature’s great laws is operating—that air rushes in to fill every foot of open space.”

Funny, right? Soon after the letter was written, the mud problem disappeared. The town paved its main streets in the late 1920s, around the same time crews completed the construction of U.S. Highway 1.

This led to a shift in public opinion. Now that road conditions weren’t the problem, people found the new congestion and traffic rather unbearable. In 1947, as Wake Forest neared 4,000 residents (less than one-tenth of today’s population), the local Chief of Police found it necessary to publish a warning to assist folks through what was considered a period of crippling growth.

“As you know, Wake Forest is overcrowded with people and automobiles and the only solution to the traffic problems is for every driver to do right and obey the laws; by doing so it will show courtesy, and everyone concerned will appreciate this cooperation.”

The cooperation wasn’t much of a challenge. What followed were sixteen rules about where to park, how to park, and when to move your car. Students also wrote about the hazards of speeding cars near the current location of the roundabout at Wake Forest Baptist Church, a spot where many had to dart through traffic to eat at the cafeteria across the street.

Finally, no article about public griping in Wake Forest is complete without mentioning the trees. It’s nice to note that nearly 120 years ago, the Board of Commissioners was already passing tree protection ordinances in response to concerned citizens who wanted to stop “any person willfully damaging or destroying any of the shade trees” in town.

As always, it’s educational and entertaining to research the digitized records of our historic publications. As they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. If you’d like to search these archives for yourself, you can find the Old Gold & Black at https://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/handle/10339/48/browse?type=dateissued  and the Wake Forest Student at www.digitalnc.org.

 (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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