100 years of history
These days, if someone mentions the historical Depression, we think of the 1930s, the stock market crash, the Dust Bowl, Okies and widespread unemployment.
But it was not that simple or even confined to the 1930s.
The 1920s were a time of great postwar prosperity in most of the country, prosperity fueled by credit, time-payment buying for everything from stocks to radios and Model Ts.
But the Federal Reserve had set below-market interest rates, favoring big banks, and the supply of money had increased by 60 percent during the decade. In 1929 the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates, and in late October of 1929 the New York stock market collapsed. Almost $30 billion in capital values disappeared.
There had already been a depression that lasted through 1920 and 1921, but what we remember as The Depression was the one that lasted from 1929, with some recovery around 1935, up through 1941 when wartime defense spending galvanized the economy.
The records in the Wake Forest Town Board minutes for the 1920s and 1930s show the problems had been gathering for perhaps a decade. Farm families were already suffering before 1929, and their troubles rippled into the town’s stores where farmers bought their flour and coffee, their feed and seed, usually on credit until the crop was sold.
When cotton prices plummeted from 40 and 50 cents a pound to 8 cents a pound as it did in 1922, the money from the cotton gin owner might not even stretch to pay all of this year’s furnishing. A lot of the town’s economy was based on cotton then, with cotton fields all around town and cotton gins in every rural neighborhood.
One gin, owned by a member of the Gill family, C.E. Gill (Cletus Euphatus), or Mr. Bud, who lived in the South Brick House with his brothers and sisters, was right in town along North White, about where townhouses are going up behind CVS.
By 1929, townspeople had been falling behind in their taxes and street assessments for years. Only a third of the total tax assessment of $15,000 was paid within the year on a tax rate of $1.50 per $100. In May of 1929, the commissioners asked Mayor Andrew J. Davis to do all he could to collect those unpaid taxes.
Wake County was already holding tax sales, auctioning off the property of delinquent taxpayers. The commissioners told their attorney, John G. Mills, to do all he could to protect the interests of the town when property within the town limits was involved.
To do that, Mills bought the property. He paid $100 for George Green’s property, $135 for A.P. Johnson’s property and $25 for Vance Sikes’ property – all in one month.
Totaling it up, in one year the town paid $2,379.05, in another year over $5,000 to purchase the property of tax delinquents. One case was well documented. Fire and Police Chief J.L. Taylor, paid by the town, could not seem to make the money stretch. The notes never did say what the town paid him. The town paid his county property taxes for several years — $282.12 in all over the years – and took the deed for his house on Wait Avenue. The town was already holding his note for over $4,000 for his street assessments.
To foreclose or not to foreclose. The town commissioners were more indecisive than Shakespeare’s Dane, wavering first on one side and then the other. They would tell Mills to go ahead with the foreclosure suits that led to the public auctions, then they would offer time extensions to all delinquent taxpayers.
At one point they fired Mills, apparently because he had gone ahead with the foreclosure suits, and hired Percy Wilson as the town attorney and told him to reinstate the suits.
Town finances were equally shaky. For eight years the board had approved electric improvements, a new water and sewer system and paving for streets, leading to bond payments of $32,000 a year. With residents reneging on their payments, the town had no recourse but to take out the first of what would become a series of short-term loans.
For all the expenses, the town commissioners still dreamed of more building. There were plans for a fire department building that would cost $1,500 and a municipal and court building for $5,500.
(That fire station was never built. Instead, in the 1930s when the town built its town and court building at the corner of Brooks Street and East Owen Avenue, a bay for the town’s fire truck was included. The town offices were downstairs and Recorder’s Court – and town board meetings in later years – was held upstairs.
In the 1940s the town built a one-story addition on the north side to serve as an office for the new Wake Electric Cooperative. After Wake Electric moved out, the addition was used by the town clerk and the fire truck bay was converted to the town manager’s office.
In the 1960’s, the fire truck was nearly responsible for two deaths. Someone left it running, and Mayor Wait Brewer walked into the office to find two women, the town clerk and her assistant, unconscious from the exhaust. The building is currently empty since the detective division of the Wake Forest Police Department moved.
The handwritten minutes for the town board – sometimes illegible, sometimes just a blank but dated page – are the only records for what the town did. There was no newspaper except the college newspaper, The Old Gold and Black, which was not interested in town doings. And the town board met in closed session except when someone asked to address them. That person spoke, then left. The only information town residents had about board actions were posted notices.
###
