Then and now: what downtown Wake Forest’s buildings used to be

Walk S. White Street with the right information and the block does something strange: it starts showing you two towns at once. The wine bar was a drugstore that burned. The brewery was a car dealership. The artisan market was a cotton warehouse. Almost nothing downtown is doing what it was built to do, and the buildings that survived did so by being useful in ways nobody planned. Here's the then-and-now, address by address.

The rooftop that used to be a drugstore

Start where Unwined on White now serves wine under the town's only rooftop bar. In 1898, after Dr. John Benjamin Powers and pharmacist Thomas E. Holding dissolved their partnership, Holding opened his own drugstore in a two-story wooden building on this spot, its sign reading "Thos. E. Holding & Co., Wholesale Retail, Druggists & Seedsmen." Next door stood an identical twin housing R.L. Brewer's general merchandise, with doctors' and dentists' offices on both second floors, including Dr. Edwards and Dr. Powers himself. A photograph from around 1888 catches boys perched on the awning posing in fisticuffs. The wooden buildings burned in the 1920s, likely the last wooden commercial structures downtown, and were replaced by the brick building standing today, which later held Ben's of Wake Forest, a men's clothing store, before becoming a wine bar. Five uses, one footprint, 130 years.

The oldest brick on the street

Dr. Powers built downtown's first brick building around 1890, a three-story structure that still stands beside the railroad tracks on the remnant of Wait Avenue, now painted white, and he ran his pharmacy from it. Two facts make it memorable: it survived when the wooden buildings didn't, which is why it's one of the few downtown buildings of its era still present, and it was apparently a magnet for train derailments, having suffered two. Before the underpass and Roosevelt Avenue were built, Wait Avenue was the main eastern route into downtown, ending at the freight depot, which explains why a major commercial building sits on what now reads as a stub of a street. Powers built a second large two-story brick building in 1898 facing Faculty Avenue, then still a dead-end blocked by a bluff; it served as a general store, a law fraternity building, and the beloved Corner Ice Cream Parlor operated by Kathaleen Chandley, and it's event space today.

The survivors, and what they were

• The Powers Store, 100-102 West North Avenue: a large turn-of-the-century brick store, and per the town, 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.
• The Wilkinson building, facing both S. White Street and Wait Avenue, built in 1899. Mr. Wilkinson moved the family home off the site to a lot down the hill, where it stood about forty years.
• The former Water and Light Building, 1909, from the era when a new town charter authorized bonds to build a generator and electric system.
• The 1913 Wake Forest Baptist Church and the circa-1940 St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church, now Hope Lutheran, both National Register contributors, covered in the churches guide.
• The residential landmarks just north: Magnolia Hill (1928), the Wait-Taylor House (1843), the Taylor-Purefoy-Poteat-Swett House (circa 1840), the John M. Brewer House (circa 1860) and the Community House (circa 1942), all in the Historic District listed in 2003.

The great conversions

The most satisfying then-and-nows are the buildings that changed purpose entirely and got better at being themselves:

• White Street Brewing occupies a restored 1930s car dealership at 218 S. White Street, with the brew house visible from the bar and the original bones left alone; our spotlight covers its case for doing it the hard way.
• The Cotton Company turned a former cotton warehouse into a warren of artisan vendors and a gallery, the subject of our spotlight on the world inside the building.
• Sugar Magnolia runs a cafe, tea house and music lounge inside a 100-year-old storefront at 219 S. White Street, per our spotlight on its next chapter.
• The Factory, south of downtown, was the Athey Products plant, built in the 1960s where a rail siding could receive steel and ship out street sweepers, and is now the town's indoor play complex.
• The Royall Cotton Mill and its commissary, north of downtown, were converted to apartments in renovations completed in 1995 and 1996, with the commissary earning an Anthemion Award; see the mill village guide.

The photographic record

Almost everything in this guide is knowable because someone took a picture. The Wake Forest Historical Museum maintains a photographic history of White Street that pairs period images with the buildings still standing, including the c. 1888 fisticuffs photograph and a c. 1910 view taken from near the passenger depot looking toward the Powers Building and the Wake Forest Hotel. That second image records a vanished traffic pattern as much as vanished buildings: arriving train passengers could walk west toward the college or cross the tracks into downtown, and Wait Avenue was the main eastern route in. Photographs are the only reason we know what the earliest wooden storefronts looked like, since they burned before anyone documented them properly, which is a useful argument for photographing ordinary streets now.

How to read a block yourself

A few habits turn any downtown walk into this kind of reading. Look above the storefront: second floors keep their original windows, cornices and dates long after ground floors are remodeled. Look for the seams where a wooden building's replacement meets its neighbor. Note which buildings face the tracks and which face the street, since the depot-era buildings orient toward the rail corridor that justified them. And check the alignment of Wait Avenue against Roosevelt, which records the moment the underpass changed how traffic entered town. The walking guide covers today's version of the same blocks, the short history supplies the sequence, and the Historical Museum holds the photographs, including a photographic history of White Street that pairs images with the buildings still standing.

The reason all of this matters right now: a town growing this fast, per the growth guide, makes decisions about old buildings constantly, and the ones downtown survived a century of fires, a college's departure and a highway relocation. What saved them in the end was somebody finding a new use, which is worth remembering the next time an old building here looks like it has run out of purpose. The lost landmarks guide covers the ones where nobody did.