One of the fun parts about snorkeling around in the past, in this case the 1980s, is discovering what didn’t happen.
There was Hewlett-Packard. The state Department of Commerce or some industry-hunting honchos had located them, and a lot of the deal was pretty well set up before the town heard the news, though a few local people may have been tipped off.
At the end of May, 1980, Wake Forest Chamber of Commerce President Doug Leary was told Hewlett-Packard would send a speaker for the annual chamber banquet and that the company planned to build a manufacturing plant on the site of the old Wakefield Farm. (For newcomers, Wakefield Farm was centered at the manager’s house, long gone, and the huge dairy barn that is now part of a horse stable complex on Old Falls of the Neuse Road. The farm lands ran from there east to U.S. 1 (Capital Boulevard), south to the Neuse River and north about halfway to N.C. 98.)
Lewis Platt, a Hewlett-Packard vice president, obligingly turned up for the crowded banquet in June to say the plant would employ 75 to 100 people at first, 400 to 500 by 1983. The state would build a road into the property to access the plant, Raleigh was to build a water line from its new water treatment plant up Falls of the Neuse Road, and Wake Forest was to build an elevated water tank because the plant would be the town’s water customer.
That water tank turned into a local issue. Tom Jones, a Crenshaw descendant who lived in Crenshaw Hall on Durham Road and owned a lot of land on the west side of town, and local developer Steve Gould apparently would not sell the land selected at the corner of N.C. 98 and Wake Union Church Road because they had plans for a store there. In addition, neighbors along Crenshaw Drive off Wake Union Church Road in the subdivision Tom had built were bitterly opposed to the tank, and the town had to move to condemn the land.
By November, though, none of that mattered because it was apparent plans for the plant had stalled. Governor Jim Hunt and other state dignitaries went to Palo Alto to investigate. They were placated, it appeared, but nothing happened.
Next June rolls around and the plant is still a viable idea because Mayor Jimmy Perry was saying it could be “bigger than IBM” in his pleas to Highway Secretary Tom Bradshaw to hurry the construction of the N.C. 98 bypass. Perry said 10,000 people could work at the plant by 2000, but Bradshaw did not nourish Perry’s hopes. He said there was a “remote” possibility a leg of the bypass could be built in seven years.
Time went on, there was no more news from Palo Alto or Bradshaw and the dream of a Hewlett-Packard plant dimmed and blinked out like the falling sparks from fireworks.
Times were a bit different, and Wake Forest was a small town with little growth. In the early 1980s there was little for the planning board to do and members tended to forget to show up. The town commissioners were not happy about the situation and finally voted to pay each member $15 for each meeting they attended, contingent on there being funds available. Since the early 1980s were the years the town had severe financial problems, the caveat meant more than the promise.
District Court began again in Wake Forest after a 12-year hiatus. The state reorganized the court system in 1968, doing away with Recorders Court which used to meet upstairs in the old town hall, the brown building on Brooks Street next to Centennial Plaza and town hall. Now in 1980 court met in the new town hall (demolished after the current town hall was built), and there were a lot of pauses and recesses while attorneys conferred with the judge, each other, or defendants and everyone not otherwise occupied milled around gossiping. During one recess, Wake County Deputy Richard Branch said about one notably thin attorney: “I wouldn’t say that he was skinny but they had to tie knots in his legs to make him kneecaps.” That quote may not have made it into the article for that week’s Wake Weekly, but it should have.
