Before the WPA (Works Progress Administration) built the Wake Forest Community House and the Holding Park Pool, the white children in town and the college students swam, tanned and socialized at the Golf Pond near Sunset Rock on the Paschal Golf Course, though it was then just called the college golf course.
The nine-hole golf course was built shortly after the college purchased the 155-acre Walters tract in 1915. When Durham Road was built in 1930, some of the greens were in its right-of-way and they were relocated onto land loaned by Dr. G.W. Paschal, who wrote the three-volume “History of Wake Forest College: 1834-1943.” Bynum Shaw wrote Volume IV, which covered 1943 through 1967.
“The swimming pool was built about the year 1925 at the head of a small stream in the extreme western part of the (golf course) tract, Dr. Paschal wrote. “Though not ideally constructed it was most popular with the students, especially those of the summer school, and their friends, and was used once every season for a swimming tournament and beauty contest, but it has fallen into disuse since the opening of the municipal swimming pool in the summer of 1942.”
The college provided lifeguards and trainer Phil Utley went by every day to pour a disinfectant in the water.
Later, in the mid-1940s, a teen-aged Francis Lide moved to town with his parents, who rented the stone house Sybil and Don Gulley had built at the edge of town just across from the golf course. Francis hunted for golf balls in summer and rabbits in winter on the course and remembered the pond.
“A favorite magnet of the course was The Pond. It was fed by a pretty little stream that ran past a patch of beech trees. I remember trying to ice skate on it, and falling through the ice on one occasion and foolishly trying to dry my socks over a fire. Why the pond was created was unclear. It must have been a swimming hole at some time, but by the mid-40s it had become increasingly choked with water weeds. My friends and I built a raft to float on it and even used it to launch a poorly designed homemade boat.”
