A short history of downtown

Downtown Wake Forest exists because of a transaction. In 1874 the college paid to move a railroad depot from the neighboring village of Forestville, the college then sold lots on the east side of the tracks, and merchants built stores on them. Everything you see on White Street today descends from that sequence. Here's the short history, from the first storefronts to the current revival.

Before downtown: a college and a crossroads

For its first four decades, Wake Forest was a college with houses around it. The Baptist State Convention bought Calvin Jones's plantation in 1832, the institute opened in 1834, and the community that formed was academic, not commercial. The depot sat down at Forestville, which had been settled since around 1760 and predated both Raleigh and Wake Forest. Then the trustees spent $2,000.03 to move the depot north in 1874, and the commercial town began, a story the railroad guide tells in full.

1880 to 1905: the merchant generation

The town of Wake Forest College incorporated in 1880 with a boundary of 960 acres shaped as a rectangle centered on the main College Building, and a separate commercial district grew around the depot east of the tracks. The population was 833 in 1890 and 1,443 by 1910. The businesses of that first commercial generation are worth naming, because their surnames still label buildings, streets and families here:

• Powers and Holding Drug Store, founded by Dr. John Benjamin Powers and pharmacist Thomas E. Holding, one of the earliest stores east of the tracks. Powers built a hotel next to it, across from the depot.
• W.W. Holding and Company, cotton merchants.
• Dickson Brothers Dry Goods, and Mrs. M.S. Dickson's hotel.
• The Wake Forest Supply Company, which became Jones Hardware.
• R.L. Brewer's general merchandise, alongside Brewer & Sons feed and grocery, and by 1920 the Bolus Department Store, the Wilkinson general store and Keith's grocery.

The 1880s directory reads like a working village: blacksmith, shoemakers, a foundry, a cotton gin, physicians, teachers, a dentist who was also a minister. Both T.E. Holding and the Brewer family founded banks, and both failed in the 1930s.

Fire, and the arrival of brick

Downtown's architecture was decided by fire. The earliest stores were wood, and we have little record of them precisely because they burned and were rebuilt in brick. Two moments define the transition. Dr. Powers built the first brick building downtown around 1890, a three-story structure that still stands beside the railroad tracks on the remnant of Wait Avenue, now painted white, and apparently a magnet for train derailments, having suffered two. Then in 1898, when Powers and Holding dissolved their partnership, Holding opened his own pharmacy in a two-story wooden building on the east side of S. White Street, its sign reading "Thos. E. Holding & Co., Wholesale Retail, Druggists & Seedsmen." R.L. Brewer's general merchandise stood in an identical twin next door, both with doctors' offices upstairs. Both burned, and the brick building that replaced them is where Unwined on White pours wine today. That is the single best example of how this downtown works: same footprint, fourth or fifth use, different century.

The buildings that survived

Several structures from that era anchor the National Register district listed in 2003:

• The Powers Store at 100-102 West North Avenue, a large turn-of-the-century brick store described by the town as the most intact commercial building of the late nineteenth century remaining in Wake Forest. The Powers-Dodd House and Store became a Local Historic Landmark in 2016, and the adjacent Powers house is the most intact of the town's Italianate houses.
• The 1898 Powers building facing Faculty Avenue, built when Faculty was still a dead-end street cut off by a bluff, which served as general store, law fraternity building, and the much-loved Corner Ice Cream Parlor run by Kathaleen Chandley, and is now event space.
• The Wilkinson building, facing both S. White Street and Wait Avenue, built in 1899.
• The former Water and Light Building (1909), a reminder that the town's 1900s charter authorized bonds for a generator and electric system.

Building-by-building detail is in our then-and-now guide.

The lean decades

Two blows landed in quick succession. US-1 relocated west of town in 1952, pulling through traffic off Main Street, and the college left for Winston-Salem in 1956, taking the town's economic engine with it, a departure covered in the town-versus-university guide. The town persevered by recruiting industry, Schrader Brothers and Athey in the mid-1960s and Weavexx in the early 1970s, all since swept away by national and global economic change; Athey's plant on South Main is now the Factory. The mill economy north of downtown had its own arc, told in the Glen Royall guide. Through those decades, downtown got quieter, which is precisely why so much of it survived unrenovated.

What the street names remember

The merchant generation left its surnames all over the map, and noticing them turns a drive into a history lesson. Holding appears on Holding Avenue and Holding Park, for the pharmacist-banker family whose drugstore ran for over a century. Powers marks the store, the house and the first brick building downtown. Brewer, Purefoy, Dickson, Wilkinson and Keith all turn up in the record of stores, houses and National Register listings. Wait Avenue carries the first college president's name, and Calvin Jones's is on the highway. In a town where most street names now come from developers' subdivisions, the older grid still reads like a directory of the people who built it, and the cemetery guide is where most of them ended up.

The revival

What happened next is the part current residents are living in. A town of under 50,000 in 2020 now holds close to 60,000, per the growth guide, and downtown filled back in: breweries in old buildings, a rooftop bar above a former drugstore site, a cotton warehouse turned artisan market, restaurants in storefronts that sold dry goods a century ago. The hundred-year-old hot dog counter at Shorty's is the through-line, and our spotlight on how it became the town's living room is the human version of this whole history. The walking guide covers the present-day blocks, the markers tour the official memory, and the lost landmarks guide what didn't make it. The next chapter is already scheduled: the S-Line passenger rail project will put a station back on the corridor that created all of this, which means downtown Wake Forest is about to be reorganized by a train for the second time in 150 years.