If you are new to Wake Forest, you may wonder why the sports/shopping building on South Main Street is called The Factory. It’s because it was just that, a factory where, among other things, welders and fabricators built things like the 18-foot high bright yellow earth mover, a huge Tonka toy.
There was a time when Wake Forest boasted of a variety of industries – and then they disappeared.
You have to go back to the summer of 1956 when Wake Forest College packed everything into moving vans and hightailed it to the brand-new campus in Winston-Salem, professors and all.
What it left behind was a community that felt its heart had been wrenched from its body, leaving just a husk. Suddenly there was no need for the pool halls, the restaurants, the boarding houses. No freshmen would throng into downtown come the fall. No graduation would bring beaming parents by the hundreds.
After the dust settled, the community leaders began looking around to see what could be saved – or what could save the town. The faculty and staff at the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary were kind but their students tended to be married men on limited budgets. No help there. They, including John Wooten Jr., started looking for industry, figuring there were a lot of people around, including those employed at the Royal Cotton Mill, who might want a job or a different job.
Meanwhile, about 1960, the giant Burlington Industries (or whatever its name was then) built a large fabric dying and processing plant south of Wake Forest on the banks of the Neuse River. It employed increasing numbers of people, as much as 700 at one time, and became known because it ceased operations for a week for Christmas after throwing a large LARGE party for the children and families of its workers.
Finally in 1964 the committee was able to reveal the wonderful news that Schrader Bros. Inc. would move its operations – making hydraulic equipment – to land on the former Jenkins farm the Town of Wake Forest had purchased. The company would build its plant on Wake Union Church Road from the sale of bonds and thereafter pay off the bonds and pay all the taxes on the property. A town-appointed board oversaw the finances. (Membership in the board dwindled due to death until, in 2006, the remaining members sold the property to local developer Jim Adams and his company, St. Ives 220 Commercial LLC, for $2.9 million. After taxes and fees, $2.2 million was given to the town. That is now called the Futures Fund which loans or gives money to help with economic growth.)
At its peak, Schrader, which had several name and ownership changes, employed 250 to 300 people, many of them women who discovered the wages there helped the family farm enough that they could begin buying those new stoves and washers and refrigerators that Wake Electric’s new lines out into the country made possible. Jones Hardware downtown had a whole floor of appliances and one man who installed and repaired them.
Shortly afterward, Athey bought up some land south of town – the town limits had not changed since 1880 – and began hiring men and women who built street sweepers and that large equipment like the giant Tonka toy.
And then in early 1970 Weavexx bought more land south of town – a big car dealership is there now – and began producing the belts that held the slurry produced by paper plants, an integral part of the paper-making process.
You would have thought that the future for those plants looked rosy, but instead, because of poor management (Athey), corporate decisions (Weavexx which went to Canada) and changes in the industry (Parker-Hannifin, the Schrader successor), all the plants were closed by 2003. Burlington Mills closed its operations on the Neuse in 1996; Athey closed in 2001; Parker-Hannifin in 2002; and Weavexx in 2003. The Burlington Mills plant is currently a rent-a-truck space; Athey is now The Factory; the buildings at Parker-Hannifin have been almost completely demolished with just a couple walls still standing on empty ground rapidly turning to a pine forest; and the Weavexx land is now covered by new cars and the dealership offices.
The short story of Athey after it closed is interesting. In 1995 it had 310 employees and $40 million in sales.
1995 was the high point. Between then and 2000 the company went through difficult times and kept reducing the number of employees. Finally, on Dec. 1, 2000, most of the work force,125 people, were suddenly laid off, leaving only 32 people on the payroll. Although a few people were called back, Athey closed its doors in June of 2001 and declared bankruptcy.
The winning bidder for Athey Products was Five Star, which paid $12.301 million for the company where most of its management had once worked. Five Star, which was in Youngsville, had been formed in 1996 by several former Athey employees. The company was later purchased by Federal Signal Environmental Product Group, a company which owns Elgin Sweeper, another Athey competitor. Elgin still sells street sweepers.
Wake Forest developer Jim Adams and his partner, Jim Goldston, purchased the building and 38 acres early in 2001. They named it the 1839 Grandmark Center and planned to build a commercial park there.
Adams and Goldston did put up a billboard in front of the empty building: “Be Creative.”
Jeff Ammons, brother of Andy who built Heritage Wake Forest, purchased the empty hulk for $4.4 million in the fall of 2003 and began to turn it into a playground for children and adults. “I kissed my wife about three months ago and told her I’d see her in November,” he said.
He built two full-size indoor skating rinks, and – guess what? – there was an enthusiasm for skating and hockey and child-league hockey in Wake Forest and Raleigh. The rest of the building has other sports as well as restaurants and shops.
Outside, Ammons, after a suggestion from Mayor Vivian Jones, sought and received a county grant of $1.5 million to build a youth baseball complex behind the factory. The six ball fields – four Little League fields and two regulation sized high school fields – are leased to Capital City Baseball, which operates the fields and the youth tournaments.
Ammons sold the entire operation in 2015 for $17,850,000 to The Macsydney Company, a New York investment group.
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