The year began with the North Carolina Department of Transportation moving like a tortoise, coming up with a possible route for the N.C. 98 bypass with two alternative routes. The town’s first on-staff planner, Jeff Baran, said he hoped a section – the plan already called for three sections to be built separately, would make it into the state’s seven-year plan.
There was news about the campus and the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in March. First the trustees voted to purchase a much needed 1,000-gallon-per-minute pumper for the Wake Forest Fire Department, paying the town $75,917 in seven annual payments. President Randall Lolley called it part of the seminary’s “community service partnership” with the town and was photographed riding on it as it was delivered. Also Broyhill Foundation Inc. contributed $50,000 to the restoration of Lea Laboratory. The laboratory, the first in a Southern college campus devoted entirely to the study of science, was built in 1888 with a gift from the Lea Family of Caswell County. Wake Forest College President William Poteat was a scientist and promoted it, including the theory of evolution, and his family had been a prominent one in Caswell before the Civil War.
And speaking of civil war. There was one waging in Wake Forest, though largely underground. In the last days of 1979 there were a couple articles in The Wake Weekly which said four of the commissioners – Terry Carter, Guy Hill, Fred Chandley and Lyman Franklin – had been meeting secretly without informing the fifth commissioner, R.H. “Rufus” Forrest. The articles said the four planned to fire the town administrator, Julian Prosser, attorney Ellis Nassif and Town Clerk Carol Kinton. Prosser was the first town administrator (the wrong name since he was the town manager) and had been hired in 1971 by a very different town board.
That appeared to blow over in the first months of the new year but in late April the four voted to fire Prosser, Forrest voted no and Mayor Jimmy Perry supported Prosser. That was a Monday night. By Tuesday afternoon about 60 residents were in town hall – the one-story building on Elm Avenue that was razed when the new town hall was completed. The people were demanding to know why Prosser had been fired. Those speaking were former mayors Wait Brewer and Tommy Byrne, former commissioner John Sanderford, local school board member Sue Byrne, Wayne Erskine, Gene Adams, Frank Smith, Max Isley and Cora Shearon. Chandley was the only commissioner who spoke and said he did not have confidence Prosser would make rational decisions “to act in accordance with the wishes of the town board.”
The town commissioners met on May 3, and there were 80 upset people in the audience. Kinton read a letter from W.W. Holding to the board that said he hoped the board would act responsibly. The commissioners named assistant administrator Jerry Walters as interim administrator while they looked for a new one.
There was a major change underway – the building of Falls Lake. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was moving people out of the lake’s future basin, clearing land and identifying gravesites. They said 125 graves would need to be moved, and Barbara Barham at Falls was working to have them all relocated to the Falls Community Cemetery. More than 800 graves had been found and only 200 had been identified.
In May Huyck Formex, called Weavexx, announced another plant expansion.
But the big news was that Hewlett-Packard planned a large gas chromatograph plant in what is now Wakefield that would employ 400 to 500 people by 1983. Lewis Platt, head of the division planning the construction, spoke at the Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce annual banquet. The excitement continued for more than a year. Governor Jim Hunt headed a delegation to the company in Palo Alto, but the 230 acres H-P had purchased sat vacant and the plan finally died.
One plan was realized. The town’s new wastewater treatment plant on Smith Creek near the Neuse River began operations in June. The 1.2-mgd plant cost $1.2 million.
The town was also installing new street signs, the green two-bladed signs we see today, and the town had numbered all the buildings in town. The Wake Forest Rescue Squad wanted to raise $25,000 for a new crash truck.
The Wake Forest Fourth Committee had planned four days and a couple nights of activities beginning with the Little Miss July 4th Wednesday night. There was a 3-mile Freedom Run, $4,900 worth of fireworks, the Children’s Parade followed by hot dogs and drinks at Holding Park with horseshoe toss, water balloons, egg-tossing and races followed by a street dance Saturday night.
C.V. Cooley was in prison in Butner for five years for conspiring to commit bank larceny and three years for failure to appear for sentencing. The larceny charge arose from Cooley’s habit of duct-taping a black garbage bag in a bank night-deposit slot and later retrieving the bag.
That same July, Charles Overton, head of the SBI statewide drug task force, said drug traffic locally was the highest he had ever seen. W.H. “Buzzy” Anthony with the Wake County ABC Board, said, “We’re not opening any new drug cases until we get the liquor caught up.” He said white liquor made in other counties was pouring into Wake and was very dangerous. “All the white liquor we have seen since November has had lead salt poison.” None of the liquor was enough to kill immediately, he said, but it all could eventually prove fatal because the lead salt builds up in a body.
There was also a four-day 20-mile fish kill in the Neuse caused when a power outage from thunderstorms meant caustic soda leaked into the river from Raleigh’s northside treatment plant. City of Raleigh employees and state fish and wildlife agents ended it by pouring sulfuric acid in the water.
The town was in the middle of a major expansion and renovation because of the Community Block Grant it had received. In 1978 the town had annexed the Glen Royal mill village and began repairing and upgrading the homes and the streets. There was town water and sewer. That July Albert Height, a plumbing contractor, was hooking up 50 homes to sewer lines.
But town officials and residents were aggrieved because Wake County Housing Authority wanted to build 50 more low-income housing units on Stadium and Oak. Wake Forest already had 154 of the 204 low-income housing units in the county and the housing authority had built 92 units on North Allen when the town had approved 50.
The dispute quickly escalated when the federal Housing and Urban Development office in Greensboro became involved. The officials there said the town must accept the 50 units and Mayor Jimmy Perry and the town commissioners, backed by public opinion, said no. Perry began calling and meeting with Sen. Robert Morgan, Sen. Jesse Helms, Rep. Ike Andrews and Governor Jim Hunt for leverage to refuse the 50 units while keeping the $1.4 million in federal community block grant funds. Perry, Terry Carter and Jerry Walters, who had been named the town administrator, went to Washington to save the second year of the 3-year program that included money for streets in what is now called the Northeast area. But in mid-September the feds pulled the money out; Perry vowed the town would finish paving the streets and finish the renovations on the houses. The town did win other grants; by 1987 the town had received $4 million for decent housing and the town had spent close to half a million new or upgraded water, sewer, electric and recreation improvements.
1980 was also the year Wake Forest got a district court in the Wake Forest Town Hall. In 1968 the state reorganized the court system, removing the Recorder’s Court that had been held in the upstairs courtroom of the old town hall.
In October the congregation at Olive Branch Baptist Church celebrated the new steeple at the church. It had been without one since the church burned on Feb. 7 of 1954. The congregation also celebrated its 115 years of existence.
The earthen dam that would hold back Falls Lake was at its correct height, but it would be two years before the 12,000-acre lake could be used. Ninety percent of the needed land for the lake and the extensive acreage around had been purchased, displacing many families from farms and homesteads that had been passed down for generations. The cost had grown from the $51.4 million when the project was approved to $155 million.
One of the losers because of the dam was James Keith, who built a two-story restaurant on what would become the edge of the lake. He had long been well-known locally for his barbecue but the restaurant would be a whole new step up.
Retired teachers Mabel West and Pearl Ray were named the marshals for the Christmas parade.
The Teen Board for Bolus Clothing consisted of LaFerne Harris, Wendy Lynam, Andrea Joy Carter, Amy Byard, Shelia Seneca, Olivia Garcia, Pam Pearson and Sarah Tart.
Jimmy Perry, Sanford Bailey, John Rich and about 15 other men met at town hall in October to organize the Trentini scholarship fund with hopes of raising $10,000. By early December when the first Trentini banquet was held the group had already raised over $13,000. Bill Barnes was the speaker. R.H. Forrest, the former high school principal and area superintendent, said Henry Miller, Wait Brewer and Tommy Byrne helped organize the high school football team in 1956 and helped hire Tony Trentini, a Wake Forest College graduate who was also the parttime summer recreation program director.
The frequent lack of a quorum at the planning board meetings led commissioners to agree to pay members $15 for each meeting if funding was available.
The seminary would host the New Year’s Day lunch free to all area residents. President Lolley and his wife would help serve the turnip greens, black-eyed peas and cornbread.
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2 Responses
Was James Keith’s restaurant – on the edge of Falls Lake – the same building as the State Parks facility at the end of Bayleaf Church Road? There’s a dumb waiter in the back of my workroom… still curious about the former life of that building – would love to see pictures. Kitchen must have been downstairs in the basement.
Yes it is the same building.