No one or no company has an option to purchase the former Parker-Hannifin site on Wake Union Church Road, Karl Hudson IV with Thalhimer, the agent marketing the 64-acre site, said Tuesday. But there is one entity which may be interested in purchasing at least one of the four separate tracts included in the 64 acres.
Why would anyone care about the sale of a scrubby, overgrown tract with half of a shell of a building guarded with a chain-link fence? Because through the years it has been the site for the town’s economic renewal and, more recently, could have become a large area shopping center. Along the way, its sale in 2006 resulted in the town receiving $2.2 million and establishing the Futures Fund to help with economic growth.
We have to go back to 1956 when Wake Forest College moved to its new campus in Winston-Salem and left the town shell shocked. Boarding houses, restaurants, businesses catering to the students closed or left. The town’s population dropped by over a third, historic homes along Faculty Avenue (North Main Street) were empty and for sale.
Besides farming, the only industries in the area were the Royal Cotton Mill in its separate mill village, where most of the workers lived, and Burlington Mills’ Wake Finishing Plant built in 1948 on U.S. 1 south of town that drew its workforce of up to 500 from a large area. Wake Forest needed industry and set up the Industrial Development Corporation which went hunting. The directors found Schrader Bros., a firm producing small hydraulic equipment.
The IDC sold bonds and purchased about 30 acres of the former Jenkins farm, built a manufacturing plant and leased it to Schrader for rent that paid of the 20-year bonds. Classes to teach new employees how to operate the machines while construction was underway were held in the W.W. Holding’s old cotton warehouse (now The Cotton Company).
In 1984 when the bonds were paid, the town refused to take ownership, preferring to receive the property tax, and the IDC retained ownership until 2006 when developer Jim Adams and his St. Ives 220 Commercial LLC bought the 30.5 acres for $2.9 million. After fees, the IDC had $2.2 million which it donated to the town. John Rich, an IDC director, said of Schrader during the donation in 2008, “They brought about three hundred and fifty jobs and paid wages that meant somebody could buy a house and a car. There’s been a huge contribution to the community.”
Schrader had undergone changes through those years, being purchased first by Bellows and later by Parker-Hannifin. And in the early years, operators cleaned the machines with trichloroethylene and reportedly dumped some of it on the ground. That led to groundwater contamination, designation of the site as a brown site by the Environmental Protection Agency, and a cleanup through by aeration paid for by Parker-Hannifin and monitored by the state that will take decades.
Adams marketed the site, bought some additional acreage and added some he already owned to bring it to the current 64 acres. Two intertwined companies, Interface Properties and Weingarten Realty Investors were interested and planned the major shopping center to be called Wake Union Place. But the town turned down the first plan, a decision the developers appealed to Wake Superior Court while working on a second plan which was approved in January 2011.
But by September of that year Interface and Weingarten had pulled out of the arrangement and an unnamed bank was foreclosing on the property. In the summer of 2012 a Miami, Florida bank holding firm, RREF BB NC SICP LLC, purchased the four parcels and may have paid $3.5 million for what was then appraised by Wake County as worth over $9 million. The current worth according to the Wake County website is $10,919,335. All of the permits for the shopping center and the road changes have expired.
One of the local casualties was the Wake Forest Fire Department. Adams had set aside two acres for the west side fire station, #4, but that was lost when Interface and Weingarten walked away. But the department studied their service areas, calculated response times from available properties and built Station #4 on Jenkins Road. It opened this year.
