One of the benefits of moving is unearthing something that had been totally forgotten.
Back in the winter of 2010, then-Director of Engineering Eric Keravuori was cleaning out and packing up his office and department in a doublewide trailer next to the old town hall, ready for the move into the new town hall. In the process he found a set of old blueprints – the real kind with blue paper and white lines – and shared it with me.
In 1925 engineer William Piatt from Durham drew up the plans for some street improvements in town and left a record of the existing streets, street names, sewer lines and streams.
The federal government had completed U.S. 1 through town in 1923, paving North and South Main streets and the streets circling the east side of the campus. Piatt included an arrow showing that from North Main you could get to Henderson because the steep bluff at the north end of the street had been tamed.
N.C. 98 was supposedly also built through town in 1923 but there is no mention of it on Piatt’s plans, and what we now call Durham Road leading from the campus westward is on the map but unlabeled. Wait Avenue is shown as Waitt St. for a block, but the rest of the street is labeled Rolesville Road.
In 1925 some of the downtown streets – White, Jones, Wait – were paved but most streets were still dirt, dusty in the summer, muddy in the winter, with the dust and mud always mixed with the droppings of horses and mules.
Entering the town from the south on South Main, Dunn Street was the first street on the right, and Piatt clearly showed a small stream rising next to the Seaboard Air Line Railway and running east toward Spring Branch. It has pretty much disappeared, except to reappear in wet times and flood the houses built in recent years in the low area next to the tracks.
It appears there is a 16-inch sewer line running under Dunn Street and emptying into that small stream. Town voters had approved a $125,000 bond for sewers in 1919 and had a letter from the state allowing the town to discharge untreated sewage into the Neuse River tributaries.
There were two other outfalls – a description of how the sewage went into the streams – in town. That first sewer system had three parts. The southernmost line stretched along South Main from what is now Owen Avenue and was discharged as noted above.
A second part ran from the intersection of North Main and Pine Avenue and then partway around the campus to run under the railroad and White Street about where Roosevelt Avenue runs now and discharged into a small stream that joined Spring Branch.
The third and smallest section served the North Main area with a line from Walnut to north of Juniper. Its outfall was to the west on an unnamed branch of Richland Creek that arose just north of Juniper.
Back to South Main entering town and going north, the next street after Dunn and also on the right was Allen St., now gone, and then Holding Street crossed South Main. As now, East Sycamore and West Sycamore were offset.
We finally come to Elm Street (now Avenue) which ran only from South Main to South White. Where it crossed the railroad, Seaboard had three parallel tracks for sidings and switching, and there were double tracks through much of the town.
Across from Elm is the block where Wake Forest Elementary School stands as well as Holding Park. In 1925, the high school and elementary students were housed in the Benton Building, a two-story brick building that faced the street. Dr. Solomon Holding’s house stood where the park is now.
The blueprint does show the unnamed stream rising behind the Holding house, a natural seep or spring that still concerns Keravuori, state water quality people and others, which runs west down a gully between today’s Woodland Avenue and Durham Road toward Richland Creek.
What we call West Owen where the Community House stands was then Vance Street, but South College Street did extend from the campus to Vance.
The downtown consisted of South White from Elm to about Spring Street, Waitt (sic), two blocks of Brook (sic) and one block each of Owen and Jones.
Rolesville Road and Waitt Street ran straight from the east, up the hill in front of the Wilkinson Store building at the corner of White, crossed the rail railroad tracks and ended at Front Street and the campus in front of the memorial arch. That intersection was quite a bit to the south of today’s Underpass and Roosevelt Avenue.
All four streets surrounding the campus were in their original positions.
South Street, now South Avenue, extended from Durham Road east to the Seaboard railroad right-of-way with its three large houses at the eastern end: the South Brick House next to South Main, then the T.E. Holding Queen Anne and then the Purefoy house that is now the office annex for Wake Forest Baptist Church. John Purefoy bought a small house from Dr. A.H. Taylor in the late 1840s or early 1850s and greatly enlarged it. The house remained in the Purefoy family for another 100 years though it is generally referred to as the Poteat house because Wake Forest College President Dr. William (Doctor Billy) Poteat lived there with his wife, Emma Purefoy Poteat.
North Street paralleled South Street across the wooded campus and was lined at that time with several small houses.
There was Front Street, as there is today, but it was on level ground, and it would be 1937 before it was lowered substantially to meet Roosevelt Avenue and the Underpass.
Just as North and South streets mirrored each other, Front Street was mirrored by Back Street, later renamed Wingate Street. In 1925 Wingate south of South Street was sketched in, not yet built. The Calvin Jones house, which served as the original Wake Forest College building, was then a boarding house on Back Street.
There was almost nothing to the west of the campus past Back Street except the unnamed, now Durham Road, and Neuse Road where we now find Stadium Drive. It would be 1940 before Groves Stadium (now Trentini Stadium) was dedicated before Wake Forest played Duke and lost, 23-0. Before that, Wake Forest College football teams played at Gore and later Groves Athletic Field, which was about where the newest seminary building, Patterson Hall, stands. The baseball field was on Faculty Avenue where the Calvin Jones House stands.
North of the campus the tree-named side streets – Pine, Walnut, Juniper — were there, but then there was nothing else on the west side until Oak Street. On the east side of North Main a Briggs Street ran to the railroad, and we know it today as Cedar Avenue. Its western partner had not been built.
Near Briggs Street Piatt indicated the siding breaking off to the west to serve the Royall Cotton Mill and the double tracks leading north.
Across the tracks from the North Main area there were several streets that have either disappeared or been renamed and a much smaller town cemetery labeled the White Cemetery.
There were several streets – First, Second, Sixth, Thomas – shown near Spring Street, which might have been named for the bedspring factory that stood at the corner of North White or for a natural spring or just because Spring is a nice name.
Second Street is clearly today’s Taylor Street, Thomas Street is now East Pine Avenue, and “B” Street has become East Walnut Avenue. Sixth Street is now a separate section of Taylor Street leading to Caddell Street and Pearce Avenue.
First Street no longer exists but ran from Spring Street parallel and close to North White Street and apparently served the rental housing called “Simmons Row,” named for Wake Forest College Professor William Gaston Simmons.
Simmons was the son of a wealthy Montgomery County family who, after graduating from Wake Forest in 1852 and attending law school at the University of North Carolina, married Mary Foote, the only daughter of a wealthy Warren County plantation owner. The Simmons family first rented and then owned the North Brick House on North Street (Avenue) on the site of the currently unused Simmons Dormitory. Simmons bought several parcels of undeveloped land near the campus but on the east side of the railroad, including a purchase of $800 for land that included what is now Wake Forest Cemetery.
About 1875 he built about seven rental houses on First Street, and one of them was sold to Ailey Young and her husband, Henry, the parents of Allen Young who established and operated the Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School, the first high school for black students in Wake County.
Although the other houses have disappeared, the Ailey Young house still stands very close to North White in the wooded corner near the cemetery. Local funds helped mothball the house this past fall; its future is unclear. (Since 2010 the Historic Preservation Commission has received grants and other funding and is close to totally rehabilitating the house.)
The blueprint also showed a number of streams, including one emerging from the northeast corner of the college campus. Keravuori said someone who had researched the history of Wake Forest Baptist Church told him the church held baptisms in that stream in the early days of the college and town. Piatt showed that unnamed stream running toward Spring Branch about where Roosevelt Avenue and the Underpass are today.
Spring Branch, which later joins Smith Creek, was shown as arising from a spring just north of East Juniper Avenue, running along what was then the western edge of the town cemetery and generally south. Originally called Kemp’s Spring Branch after Jesse Kemp, a large landowner in the early 1800s, it is pretty much buried today – under the cemetery additions, under the CVS parking lot – but you can find bits and pieces still untouched just north of Spring Street and along South Franklin Street.
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