White Street downtown was a busy place

100 Years of History

By Carol Pelosi

In the decade between 1910 and 1920, the businesses along South White Street provided goods and services for the 300 to 400 college students and 20 or so professors, for the 1,443 residents of the town and for the numerous farmers of the area. The town fathers worried about parking space for all the horse and mule teams when the farmers came to town to shop on Saturday.

Cotton was the biggest cash crop. Its importance had grown since 1869 when Peterson Dunn was presented a silver cup for shipping the county’s first bale of cotton. The Dunn family had been in the area since 1781 when John Dunn moved from Virginia and bought land in what is now Franklin County. His son, Bolling, bought an original land grant just north of the Neuse River from Francis Perry – land where Riverplace, once Burlington’s Wake Finishing Plant, now stands.

W.W. Holding opened a store on White Street about 1890, selling heavy groceries — 50- or 100-pound sacks of flour, cotton seed, fertilizer and general merchandise — but his main interest was cotton. He began to buy bales from farmers and sell them to Royall Cotton Mill, established in 1899, Sterling Cotton Mill in Franklinton and other area textile mills.

Cotton bales were also shipped to other markets from the railroad station, and the town had an official cotton weigher appointed by the town board and paid by those shipping the cotton. The wooden freight station stood where today’s White Street parking lot is. Wake Forest was not only defined by its college origin but also by its location on the state’s first rail line, the Raleigh & Gaston.

Cotton bales meant cotton gins, which seemed to be at every crossroads in Wake County and in Wake Forest. There was one along North White Street near a bedspring factory which had a short life. It was owned by C.E. Gill, who, with his sisters had moved from their plantation near town into the South Brick House.

The streets in town were dirt heavily mixed with dung from horses and mules, and any sidewalks were wood planks. There were a few of Henry Ford’s Model As and other automobiles around, but most travel was still in buggies or wagons.

A traveler headed north came into town after passing through the village of Forestville, reached the college campus, turned right to cross the tracks on Wait Avenue, turned left and went down a hill to head for Youngsville. North Main Street still ended at the bluff near the cotton mill and mill village.

Dr. John Benjamin Powers, a physician, and pharmacist Thomas E. Holding had begun a drug store in the 1880s, but they parted company in 1888. After that, Dr. Powers ran a pharmacy in what is now a white three-story building next to the railroad crossing, and his son, Bruce, took over the business around 1908.

The T.E. Holding drug store remained in the two-story frame building on White Street where the joint business had been. It stood on the northwest corner of Jones and White. In 1915 T.E. Holding Jr., who had been a star pitcher for the Wake Forest College baseball team, finished his pharmacy education and took over the store from his father, who had by then begun the Bank of Wake on the opposite corner (now an empty two-story building in the southeast corner of South White Street and Jones Avenue).

In the other half of that building, Ira Otis Jones began the Jones Hardware Company in 1906. In 1915-16, Jones built the brick building across White Street that was to be home for the business until it moved out to Durham Road many years later and closed after a few years.

Frank Keith began his own grocery store on White Street in 1913 after working for the owners of two White Street grocery stores, L.T. Wilson and S.W. Brewer Sr. The Brewer store also sold seed, feed and other staples for farmers, who bought on credit in the spring and paid in the fall after the crops were in.

In those years, meats were fresh, salted or canned. Many people kept their own hens and roosters for the eggs and the pot, but some town people had to purchase Sunday’s roaster.

Grocers bought live chickens and kept them in pens in the cellar or the back of the store. When a customer ordered a chicken, the grocer or his butcher killed it, scalded it to pull off the feathers, gutted it and cut it to order. Steers and other meat animals were butchered in an abattoir down the hill and the meat kept on ice at the stores.

The town had coal merchants and ice houses. Housewives could get daily deliveries of blocks of ice for their iceboxes.

George Bolus emigrated from Lebanon to Raleigh in 1900 and earned a living at first as an itinerant peddler with a horse and wagon. After he married Mary Thomas in 1908, they decided to open a store in a small town. Mrs. Bolus insisted it be Wake Forest because it already had the college, “a cotton mill, a good community and nearby were Youngsville, Rolesville and Falls of Neuse.” They first opened small stores in town, and in 1917 moved into what is now Wake Forest Art & Frame Gallery. In the 1920s the Bolus Department Store moved across the street into the double connected store that is now The Purple Door Day Spa and NC General Stores.

There were also foundries, livery stables, a hotel, restaurants and men’s clothing stores, and the student newspaper, The Old Gold & Black, began to run their ads in its first issue in January of 1916.

There were still houses along White Street such as Ruby Reid’s parents’ home, and Watson Wilkinson remembered his grandfather daily leading his cow across the street to and from the pasture down the hill.

Next week, the Great War, the Spanish flu, electric bills and mules.

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