Just a little history: Why newcomers can’t find downtown, part three

You might understand downtown Wake Forest better by talking about two people, maybe three.

The first is Thomas Elford Holding, born in 1866, the fourth of six sons born to Willis and Nancy Pace Holding. Willis Holding built the house that still stands well back from South Main Street and near the railroad tracks. All six sons attended Wake Forest College, and Thomas became an outstanding baseball pitcher at the time when baseball, not basketball or football, was the premier college sport.

There is not enough evidence to understand why he became a pharmacist at a time when they made their own pills and potions to suit the disease or problem, but laudanum was the wonder drug of the time, containing morphine and codeine and prepared by dissolving extracts from the opium poppy in alcohol.

We know that in 1888 Dr. John B. Powers dissolved his pharmacy partnership with T.E. Holding (we do not know why the partnership ended or how long it lasted), but we can surmise that Holding reacted by building or renting the two-story wooden building and starting the drugstore business that lived on well over 100 years. We also know that he had studied pharmacy in Henderson and received his pharmacist’s license.

That wooden building stood on the east side of South White Street at the corner of what is now East Jones Avenue and its sign said: “Thos. E. Holding & Co., Wholesale Retail, Druggists & Seedsmen.” The R.L. Brewer general merchandise store was in an identical building next door, and both advertised doctor’s offices on the second floor.

We do know that both – and maybe several others – stood until 1925, when a fire destroyed them. They may have been the last wooden commercial buildings downtown. We also know that the land later housed a new building, Ben’s of Wake Forest, a men’s clothing store with a second one somewhere in Raleigh. Today, after a progression of uses, it is Unwined, a wine store.

And we do know that Dr. Powers built the first brick building in downtown about 1890 and operated his pharmacy in that three-story building, now painted white, that still stands next to the railroad tracks on the remnant of Wait Avenue. The building was apparently a magnet for train derailments, suffering two. The first derailment damaged the building though not beyond repair, and the second left the engine inches away from the building.

Another downtown Wake Forest landmark – the Wilkinson building facing both South White Street and Wait Avenue – was built nine years later in 1899. Mr. Wilkinson moved the family home from that site to one just down the hill and the home stood there for about forty years. The family still owns the land where the Hardee’s on Roosevelt Avenue stood. The three-story building now has Las Margarita’s in the basement, and through the years has housed the offices for Wilkinson’s two doctor sons (who also built nearly identical houses on South Main Street with a shared garage), a dry cleaner shop run by his third son, several restaurants and bars, a movie theater, retail stores, a hotel, a student dormitory and a public health clinic.

In 1891 Holding married Minta Royall, daughter of Dr. William Royall, and they had five children. T. E. Holding Jr. or II was born to be a druggist and succeeded his father in ownership of the business; R.P. Holding married well and became the president of First-Citizens Bank in Smithfield, now state wide; Harvey stayed in Wake Forest and became an oil distributor; Minta Holding married E.E. Folk, professor of English at Wake Forest College later University, and they lived for years in the South Brick House on South Avenue; and Leila Holding married Ben T. Aycock who owned two men’s clothing stores and later was the Wake Forest postmaster.

Holding must have been doing well with his business because in 1899 he built the Queen Anne house on South Avenue  where a skeleton hanging from a front yard tree dresses up for each holiday and some others the current owners think up. The Aycock family owned the house until 2003 when the present owners bought it.

Probably because Holding was related to the Royall family by marriage and because he was a successful businessman he became a director of the Royall Cotton Mill when it was organized on paper in 1899. The president was William C. Powell of Savannah who built a summer house on Faculty Avenue in 1895 and had a business in town (see last week’s list of businesses). Holding was eased out of management of the mill in later years as Royall family members took over.

After the 1925 fire, Holding moved his pharmacy business into half of an existing building across East Jones Avenue and it became the T.E. Holding Drugstore. The drugstore was in the southern half of the building.

In the northern half, I.O.  Jones’ Wake Forest Supply Company occupied it from 1906 to 1916, when Jones built another building across the street and named it Jones Hardware.

1916 must have been the year that Holding moved the bank he owned, the Bank of Wake, into the northern half of what we call the Holding building. He had obtained a charter for the bank in 1898; where it was housed in the first 18 years is another town mystery. Maybe the bank was somehow housed with the drugstore in the wooden building.

Along with businesses, there were homes along South White Street and nearby streets, and one of them was the Reid family home, a two-story building with a white picket fence, probably in the block with the Hale Building. Their daughter, Ruby, was born in 1885 and always lived in the house, inheriting it when her parents died. Reid, attractive but not beautiful, never married but was a success in business. She started and operated the first telephone company, Home Telephone & Telegraph, named Home because it was first located in her home and later moved to the back office of the Bank of Wake before she sold it to a regional telephone and telegraph company.

In the 1920s, Zua Davis wrote to a friend, “I continue forgetting to tell you of our telephone system here. You will laugh, but it’s really quite nice in uniting the town by keeping everyone informed. Miss Ruby Reid is the operator. She listens to all the calls, and if the girls call and I’m not at home, she tells them where I am. There are no secrets in Wake Forest.” Marie Joyner and Cora Shearon were also early operators.

Reid also owned an insurance company and rented rooms in her house to Wake Forest College students, whom she referred to as “her boys.” On her death in 1954 the town discovered she had left a substantial estate with the proviso it be spent on the children of the town. The result was the Ruby Reid Day Care on the northwest corner of Wingate Street and Durham Road next to the Seminary Cafeteria. Both buildings are gone, razed to make way for Patterson Hall. The day care relocated for a few years and then quietly closed.

Back on South White Street, T.E. Holding the first helped with the commercial expansion of the town and with civic improvements such as paving roads. On South White Street the two town wells were closed, sidewalks were built and the town enjoyed becoming a market town where surrounding farmers came on Saturdays to sell their cotton – the town employed a cotton weigher – and buy goods from the local merchants who also supplied the boarding houses where college students lived and ate.

Many of the businesses catered to students – the two movie theaters, the many restaurants and soda shops and pool halls – and the downtown streets were lively.

As his father had other businesses and even served as a state senator, T.E. Holding Jr. took over the drug store and began making it his own with a distinctive ceiling light and improved drugs.

Then came the Crash of 1929. The Brewer family’s bank, Citizen’s Bank, closed that year or the next. Holding kept the Bank of Wake going – and a large part of its assets were the debt repayment funds the Town of Wake Forest had placed there. One of the Holding sons, Harvey Holding, was managing the bank as his father’s health declined. Harvey used individual accounts as collateral for the town money, and when the Bank of Wake closed in December of 1931 the town had its money. T.E. Holding the first died shortly after in early 1932 at the age of 66.

Tom Holding (T.E. Jr.) always feared he would be robbed for the cash the drugstore took in every day. After he bought a Royall family home on Juniper Avenue he had built a driveway directly to the front porch and door. He would drive up every night after the drugstore closed, grab the bag of cash and coins and run toward the door which his wife, Irene, opened.

Tom ran the drug store until 1954, when he suffered a heart attack. His widow, Irene, took over and ran it for 12 years, turning the unused bank building into a bookstore, until the third Holding, T.E. Holding III, or Tommy, came back to town as a full-fledged pharmacist in 1966.

It was Tommy Holding who left that South White Street building for a new venture, the Wake Forest Plaza which opened in 1977, a small strip mall on an extension of Brooks Street to the south, where Holding Drugs was the anchor store on the end – now part of the town’s Renaissance Centre – and Winn-Dixie was the grocery store in the middle. Tommy also produced a new drug, Sex-Alert composed of different vitamins, which was always for sale next to the cash register.

Tommy died in the 1980s – I could not find his obituary, and his widow, Sue, owns the empty building on South White Street at East Jones Avenue. For some years after Tommy moved the drugstore there were either bars or restaurants in the first floor, but at some point a problem – A hole in the kitchen floor? The requirement for a better grease trap? – closed a restaurant and there have been no more tenants.

There are stories about each of the buildings along South White – the former Bolus Department Store with its two store fronts for men’s clothing and women’s clothing which are now the Purple Door Day Spa and NC General  Stores; or the coffee shop next door where the Keith’s Grocery Store suffered a fire on January 18, 1961 which gutted the store and had firemen fighting sleet, freezing rain and ice along with the flames; or the current Cotton Company whose two-story building was once three stories housing the Davis Furniture Store: living rooms on the first floor, bedrooms on the second and coffins on the third.

So how does someone get to downtown? First of all, it is on the east side of the CSX railroad track that runs north and south through the town.

Also, South White Street runs north and south between South Main Street to the west and South Franklin Street to the east. It ends just before it reaches the N.C. 98 Bypass to the south, but to the north it continues as a state road and a way to get to Youngsville.

Coming from South Main Street you can reach South White by turning right onto East Holding Avenue and making a left turn toward the downtown or by turning right onto Elm Avenue and then turning left or right.

Coming from the west on Durham Road, follow that to South Avenue and Front Street, turning right to go through the Underpass and turning right at the next intersection.

Coming from the north on U.S. 1-A also North Main Street, turn left at the campus, take a left at the Underpass and a right at the next intersection.

From the east along the bypass, turn right onto South Franklin Street, turn left at any intersection and right onto South White.

From the east along Wait Avenue, approach the Underpass and turn left at the intersection before it.

If you are brave enough to use the bypass, use that superstreet to make a U-turn to reverse direction and then take Franklin Street.

And that’s how to get to downtown!

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(The Wake Forest Planning Department has published a folding map of the National Register Historic District that is downtown Wake Forest with full-color pictures and short descriptions of each contributing building in the historic district.

(There is also a virtual tour of the district on South White Street which you can find by going to www.wakeforestnc.gov and looking for “Downtown Historic District.”)