Stand on the sidewalk outside 306 South White Street and notice that it is unusually high.
That is not a design decision. That sidewalk was a loading dock. Trucks backed up to it and workers moved cotton bales in and out of the warehouse behind it.
The building is The Cotton Company now. Almost everything about how it works today is explained by what it used to do.
The W.W. Holding Cotton Exchange Warehouse
W.W. Holding and Company were cotton merchants, one of the businesses that grew up on White Street after the railroad depot was relocated closer to the college in 1874 and Wake Forest College began selling lots on the east side of the tracks.
The company bought and sold local cotton and operated as a brokerage across the Southeast. Wagons and trucks brought bales in from surrounding farms. The cotton was graded, sold, and loaded out the back onto the train, which carried it to factories to be made into cloth.
The grading happened next door, in a two-story brick building that held the company offices. There is a large north-facing window on the second floor, which was necessary for classing: examining fibers for color, length, and quality requires consistent, indirect northern light. A man named Buddy Holding was said to be one of the best classers in the business.
Here is the detail that reorganizes how you see the building. What is now the front of The Cotton Company was originally the back. The wagons came to the White Street side and had their bales hoisted up to the loading area for the railroad. The tracks are now behind the building, and they are still active.
Local memory of the place is specific. Wake Forest native Lewis Hooks recalled that his father worked for W.W. Holding Cotton Company from 1933 to 1960, and that sometime in the early 1950s the outdoor cotton storage running parallel to the railroad tracks caught fire.
Bob and Elizabeth Johnson
The Johnsons bought the warehouse in January 2000. Their stated goal was to help lead the revitalization of the historic district.
Consider what that meant at the time. Wake Forest’s population was about 12,500. Downtown was quiet. They had just purchased an enormous industrial building with a floor plate far too large for any single retailer a town that size could support.
Their first move was to invert the building. They shifted the entrance from the railroad side to South White Street, turning the old back into the front and pointing the whole operation at the downtown street rather than the tracks.
Their second move solved the size problem: instead of one tenant, fill it with many. Phase one opened in November 2000 with 5,000 square feet of ground-floor marketplace. The renovation was broken into phases because the building was simply too big to do at once.
In 2001 the Johnsons received the Anthemion Award for historic renovation and adaptive reuse, shared with architect Matt Hale and builder McDonald-York.
And during that first buildout, Karen and Rob Bennion opened Over the Falls Deli as a tenant. That business is now one of the most popular restaurants in Wake Forest, on its own building down the street. Two anchors of the modern downtown started in the same warehouse in the same year.
How the booth model works
The Cotton Company owns booths and rents them to individual vendors. Getting one involves an application, an interview, and a lease. Vendors get a year to decide whether to stay.
Some stay indefinitely. Others use the booth as a launchpad and graduate into their own storefronts and studios, which is arguably the more valuable function. A booth is a low-risk way to find out whether people will pay for what you make.
More than 75 vendors operate there now, alongside working artist studios. The painter Dick Larsen keeps a studio on the far left side and turns up in reviews by name, described by one customer as an awfully nice fellow.
What is for sale is genuinely varied: jewelry, artwork, pottery, clothing, soaps, bath and body products, candles, spices, food, home décor, furnishings, toys, gifts, collectibles. Women’s boutiques operate inside, including one called Georgia Maes. Much of it can be personalized.
An outside observer writing about American main-street retail noted that the arrangement looks at first like a lack of identity, clusters of booths every few feet selling radically different things, some meticulously arranged and some jumbled. That is accurate, and it is also the point. The building supplies the identity. The industrial shell holds it all together.
They also run an event venue used for weddings and banquets, plus workshops and classes.
Give it an hour
Reviewers are consistent that this takes longer than you expect. The building has nooks and crannies. You will walk past something on the way in and only see it on the way out.
Gift wrapping is free and, by multiple accounts, very good.
What the building teaches
The Cotton Company opened at the beginning of the downtown revitalization, when there was not yet much evidence it would work. It is now the anchor tenant of a main street in a town that has grown more than fourfold since.
The tagline the Johnsons landed on says it in five words: yesterday’s architecture, today’s artisans. A building that once graded cotton for shipment to distant factories now houses seventy-five people making things by hand and selling them to their neighbors.
The trains still go by out back.
The Cotton Company, 306 S. White Street, Wake Forest. thecottoncompany.net