100 years of history
By Carol W. Pelosi
In 1910 Wake Forest was a quiet college town. Dr. William L. Poteat was the college president, known for his love of singing as well as science. He was famous — or infamous — across the country for his defense of evolution.
His home, which was owned by his wife, Emma Purefoy Poteat, still stands on what was Wait Avenue next to the railroad tracks. In 1910 it had a one-story porch trimmed with trellises which has since been replaced with two-story columns. Wake Forest Baptist Church has its offices there.
The Seaboard train depot, where students and townspeople gathered to meet every train, was next door to Poteat’s home.
On campus, Wingate Memorial Building, the old College Building “Old Main” and the Heck-Williams Building stood in a line, dominating the campus. In the corner of Wingate and the Durham Road, the College Hospital building had just been completed in 1906 for the use of students and some townspeople. Two-story porches surrounded the square building.
No pregnant women could be admitted although there was a full Mothers Plaque on the wall indicating some births had taken place there. “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.”
This was a time, after all, when women’s dresses reached from ear lobes to ankles, though by 1919 skirts were ankle high.
On another corner of the campus, Wake Forest Baptist Church was 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, including the Wilkinson corner brick building that most recently was home to Las Margarita’s and the white three-story brick building next to the train tracks.
The streets were still unpaved, the town commissioners kept muttering into their minutes that hogs were not allowed in town and the board set a new electric rate – one for electric stoves – at a $3 monthly minimum.
The town fathers spent a great deal of time talking about mules, the town’s mules.
“F.A. Dickson was instructed to make such disposition of the town mule as he thought best, her condition now being such as made her of little use to the town,” the minutes from April 11, 1912, said. She was traded for two other mules and $400.
Soon after, “W.E. Mitchell is to use his efforts to make some disposition of the town mule, which is now unfit for service,” the Sept. 9, 1913, minutes said. One mule was sent to Raleigh to be treated in February of 1914, while the town policeman, W.W. Bobbitt, was asked to dispose of yet another.
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 the college boys and some of the town boys went off to the Great War, but Europe and the trenches through Belgium and France were far away. The great world seemed closer in the fall of 1918 when the Spanish Flu came to America after beginning in Europe where it killed 86 percent of the American casualties.
Students began falling ill on Sept. 14, 1918, registration day at the college, 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 who gathered there frequently.
There were no undertakers in Wake Forest at the time, but a businessman, Priestley Davis, stepped into that breach and signed his name as undertaker for a number of burials of white and Black victims.
He was a local man who, after a career in Atlanta, moved back to Wake Forest and bought the brick house which stands next to Holding Park. He bought or rented a three-story brick building on South White Street (now part of The Cotton Company), installed an elevator, and opened a furniture store with parlor and dining room furniture on the first floor, bedroom suites on the second and caskets on the third.
He had a horse named Lucy and a hearse and a Black man, probably the man called Uncle Joe, the family’s yard man, who doubled as the hearse driver. Unfortunately, Priestley Davis was to need those services himself soon after the Spanish flu eased its grip. He died in 1923 from the complications of kidney stones.
On Oct. 5, 1918, 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 Spanish Flu was particularly deadly in the Black population of town and nearby. So much so that there is a common grave, a pit in which several bodies were thrown because their families were not able to bury them properly in the now old graveyard for Friendship Chapel Baptist Church. Ground-penetrating radar found the common grave site several years ago, and the cemetery, now outlined with black fencing, remains in the new Holding Village development.
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.
Next week, the town builds its first water and
sewer systems
