Just a little history: Wake Forest’s first pandemic

In the summer of 1918 Wake Forest was a quiet college town with somewhere between 1,443 residents (1910 Census) and 1,536 (1930 Census). For some reason, every Census list I have says the 1920 number was “Not Recorded.”

Dr. William L. Poteat was the college president, known for his love of singing as well as science. His home still stands on what was Wait Avenue next to the railroad tracks. In 1918 it had a one-story porch trimmed with trellises which has since been replaced with two-story columns. Wake Forest Baptist Church now owns the house and uses it for the church offices.

The Seaboard train depot, where students and townspeople gathered to meet every train, was next door to Poteat’s home, although he never owned it – it was passed down from her grandfather, James Purefoy, and father, Addison Purefoy, to Emma Purefoy Poteat.

On campus, Wingate Memorial Building, the old College Building and the Heck-Williams Building stood in a line, dominating the campus. At the corner of Wingate and the Durham Road, the College Hospital building, completed in 1906, was used by both students and some people in town, mainly faculty. Although there was a full Mothers Plaque on a wall, pregnant women were no longer admitted. ““In May 1915, on the complaint of certain ladies of Wake Forest, for the protection of immature students no maternity cases were allowed in the hospital,” Dr. G.W. Paschal wrote in “A History of Wake Forest College.”

On another corner of the campus, Wake Forest Baptist Church had been built in 1913 and 1914 at the then princely sum of $50,000. I doubt any church member or passerby has regretted one penny of a cost that resulted in one of the finest church buildings in the state.

Downtown, many of the buildings would be recognizable today like the three-story brick Wilkinson Building at the corner of Wait Avenue and South White Street. Mr. Wilkinson reportedly had moved the family home farther down the hill to build this hub of commerce. Powers Drugstore next to the tracks with a two-gable hotel beside was there as well as Holding Drugstore. To the south, a three-story building housed Priestley Davises’ furniture store – first floor, living room suites, second floor, bedroom suites, third floor, caskets. As a two-story building it has housed the W.W. Cotton Company and now The Cotton Company.

The streets were still unpaved and two or three town-maintained wells were in the middle of South White Street. The town commissioners kept muttering into their minutes that hogs were not allowed in town but in that same year the board had to set a new electric rate – one for electric stoves – at a $3 monthly minimum.

The Great War, what we now call World War I, was not really reflected in the town board minutes, although in the fall of 1917 the town did prohibit the use of electricity on Mondays to save fuel. A wartime federal Fuel Administrator restricted the use of electric signs that same fall, there was sugar rationing, Broadway shows shut down to save coal and the entire country participated in meatless days.

A number of college boys and town boys went off to the Great War after President Woodrow Wilson finally agreed in 1917 to join the Allies, but Europe and the trenches through Belgium and France were far away.

That distant world came to Wake Forest on Sept. 14, 1918, registration day at the college. Students began falling ill with what was called the Spanish flu during the day, and by nightfall all the College Hospital beds were full. The Euzelian dormitory in the old College Building was taken over as a hospital ward. That fall, 60 percent of the students and eight faculty members were to fall ill, cared for mostly by the three doctors on the School of Medicine faculty. Six patients later developed pneumonia and one student died.

The flu cut the same swath through the town. Commissioner R.H. Mitchell died, and his replacement on the board, I.O. Jones, the hardware store owner, was asked to buy a tent for the town that could be used at the cemetery for the convenience of the many mourners going there.

On Oct. 5, the town board banned all public meetings including the moving picture show, public schools, churches and classes at the college.

There were even stricter quarantines for some. Late in January of 1919, the board voted to isolate the Henry Stallings house, forbidding family members to leave and others to enter. Later the board reimbursed Stallings $15 for his expenses during the quarantine.

The flu seemed to ease its onslaught as winter turned to spring and life went back to normal. But it returned that following winter, and in February of 1920 all public meetings were again banned except for regular college classes and Anniversary Day exercises.

There were no newspapers in Wake Forest except the student newspaper, The Old Gold & Black, but since the college closed in 1918 there were no issues that year. Mention of Wake Forest in the Raleigh newspapers was sparse.

We do know that the Spanish flu was so rampant among the Black residents that a communal burial pit was used in the now-unused cemetery for Friendship Chapel Baptist Church.

For white residents, the funeral home always named on the death certificates was Davis Furniture Company because he provided a horse, driver and hearse during, before and after the pandemic.

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