House, store track WF history

Last month the Wake Forest Town Board approved the request by Marty and Debbie Ludas to have their gray Victorian house facing North Avenue and their two-story brick store building facing North Main Street – both are on the same lot – designated as Local Historical Landmarks.

They join five other Local Historical Landmarks, the Battle-Purnell house on North Main Street, the I.O. Jones house on South Main Street, Oakforest on Sewall Drive, the Heartsfield house on Ligon Mill Road and the Purefoy-Chappell house on South Main Street.

But the Ludas buildings reflect much of the history of Wake Forest that none of the others do. They are referred to as the Powers-Dodd house and store in the history documented by Ruth Little of Longleaf Historical Resources.

John Benjamin Powers from Wallace, N.C., was a student at Wake Forest College, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1876 and his medical degree in 1878. During that time he met Harriet (Hattie) Brewer, a granddaughter of the college’s first president, Samuel Wait, and they married in 1879. For the first years of their marriage they lived with her parents, John and Eliza Wait Brewer, in their home on North Main Street, then called Faculty Avenue, a household of 13 people in a house that began as a log cabin and still stands.

Ben and Hattie Powers apparently built the Victorian house on North Avenue about 1893 after purchasing the lot in 1892. By the 1900 Census, there were three generations living in the house: Ben and Hattie; their children John B., Bruce L., Hallie C., and Benjamin Frank. Their oldest child, Fannie, lived there with her husband, Roscoe S. Dodd, who worked at Gents Furnishing Goods, and their son, Benjamin R.

Ben (Dr. Powers) was a physician, apparently with his office in the house, and the family story is that he sometimes performed surgery on his back porch.

Dr. Powers also invested in real estate and commercial ventures. Shortly after the Raleigh & Gaston Railroad depot was moved from Forestville in 1874 to a location just across from the entrance to the college campus, Dr. Powers built the first commercial building in what would become the town’s downtown, a two-story brick building facing Wait Avenue where his son Bruce operated a drugstore. (The building still stands, now housing Sweetie’s candy shop. The third story was added in later years.)

About 1897 Dr. Powers fell ill and believed he was dying. To provide for his family he built the two-story brick store building which Hattie designed. In the early years that building was rented to Z.V. Peed, who lived across the street in an ornate Victorian house that remains. On the north wall of the building you can still see faint traces of the store’s sign, “Z.V. ________ and Co. Dry Goods, Notions, Shoes, Groceries Etc.”

By 1910, most of the family still lived in the family house with their parents. Those in the home included son Bruce and his wife, Sarah; daughter, Hallie C., 21; son Benjamin F., 15; and daughter Fannie Powers Dodd, now divorced, and her sons, Benjamin R., 11, and Carey N., 9. By 1920, Ben and Hattie’s house held fewer, just themselves; their son Benjamin Franklin (Frank), a businessman; and their daughter Fannie and her sons Benjamin and Carey. Daughter Hallie had married Thomas M. Arrington and they lived next door in the house her brother, Bruce, built in 1910.

Dr. Powers died in 1926 after practicing medicine for 47 years. His widow, Hattie, moved next door to live with Hallie and Tom Arrington (the town’s first fire chief), leaving Fannie Dodd in the family homes with her son, Carey. By 1940 Carey had moved to Raleigh where he ran a drugstore on Wilmington Street, and Ben Dodd, a doctor who had an office in the next-door store building, was living with Fannie.

When Ben had a heart attack about 1946, Carey and his wife, Elizabeth (Lib), and their three daughters, Francine (O’Hara), Harriet (Barlowe) and Mary Ella (Mangum) moved into the house with Fannie while Carey commuted to Raleigh.

Carey inherited the house from his mother and lived there until his death in 1975, His widow, Lib, inherited the house and rented it to seminary students while she operated a daycare for several years on North College Street until it burned to the ground one night. After Lib’s death, Harriet inherited the house and store and sold it to Marty and Debbie Ludas in 2007.

It was that store which had the most colorful history, probably because it was just across the street from the college campus and because there was no college cafeteria. Students ate in boarding houses all over town, or in restaurants. In the 1926 and 1936 Sanborn insurance maps, something called the Williams Club House Restaurant occupied the first floor of the store building with the small second-floor rooms rented out as offices.

In the late 1930s Miss Jo Williams Cafeteria, the unofficial college cafeteria, was in the first floor.

About 1946 Carey Dodd converted the store into the Pi Alpha Delta law fraternity with bedrooms upstairs, meeting and party rooms downstairs. But that ended when the college moved to Winston-Salem in 1956.

For the next 11 years, Dick Stevens, a theology professor, ran Stevens Bookstore in the building, filling it with bookshelves and boxes of books, a wide variety though he specialized in textbooks with an emphasis on theology. He moved downtown to the former Hollowell’s grocery store about 1975, and Kathaleen Chandley renovated the building again, this time for an ice cream and sandwich and soup shop she called The Corner Ice Cream Shop, which was popular with seminary students and townspeople. She closed it in 2007 when the Harriett Barlowe sold the house and store to the Ludases.