Lost Wake Forest: the landmarks that vanished, and where they stood

Every town keeps two histories: the one you can still walk through and the one you can only stand on top of. Wake Forest's lost buildings include the college's first great hall, burned by an arsonist; a professor's house demolished for no better reason than the era's indifference; the wooden storefronts that fire replaced with brick; and an entire school campus that served Black children for half a century before the last building came down in 1976. Here's what's gone and where it stood.

Wait Hall, burned 1933

The most consequential loss on the old campus. When seventy-two students had enrolled by the end of the college's first year, architect John Berry of Hillsborough was hired to enlarge the school, and he designed three brick buildings constructed between 1835 and 1838: a classroom structure and two professors' houses. The classroom building came to be called Wait Hall, in honor of first president Rev. Samuel Wait, and it replaced the Calvin Jones House on the center of campus, which was relocated to make room. Wait Hall was destroyed by fire in 1933, the victim of an arsonist. It stood where the seminary's Stealey Hall stands now, which means the same ground has held the founding farmhouse, the college's first great building and a seminary administration hall in succession. Walk it with the campus guide.

The North Brick House, demolished 1936

The two professors' houses from Berry's 1835-38 building campaign were known as the North Brick House and the South Brick House, for their positions, and were first occupied by Professors C.W. Skinner and Amos J. Battle. The North Brick House was demolished in 1936, three years after Wait Hall burned, leaving the South Brick House at the corner of South Avenue and South Main Street as the sole survivor of the college's original brick construction. Losing two of three within three years is how quickly a founding-era campus can nearly disappear.

The wooden storefronts, burned in the 1920s

Downtown's earliest commercial buildings are gone almost entirely, and fire did it. Thomas E. Holding's two-story wooden drugstore on the east side of S. White Street, with its "Wholesale Retail, Druggists & Seedsmen" sign, and R.L. Brewer's identical general merchandise store next door, both with medical offices upstairs, burned in the 1920s. They may have been the last wooden commercial buildings downtown. We know what they looked like only because a photograph survives, taken around 1888, catching boys perched on an awning. The brick replacement holds a wine bar today, a sequence the then-and-now guide traces. The earliest stores of all left no record at all, precisely because they burned and were rebuilt in brick before anyone thought to document them.

The Wake Forest Normal and Industrial School

The most significant loss in the Northeast Community. Allen Young, born in the house on N. White Street that still stands, helped found the Normal and Industrial School, the first private school for African American children in Wake Forest. Community fundraising, plus Rosenwald Fund support, later financed a high school that opened in 1939, and the combined grades became the DuBois School, whose success gradually reduced enrollment at Young's institution. The Normal and Industrial School downsized to primarily preschool and kindergarten before closing in 1957, the year Young died at 82. Its campus structures were rented out, torn down or used for storage until the last main building was demolished in June 1976. The Ailey Young House guide tells the fuller story, and the Alston-Massenburg Center guide covers what the same neighborhood kept.

The infrastructure that disappeared

• The passenger depot and the hotel beside it. Dr. Powers built a hotel next to his drugstore across from the depot, and the depot itself was the entire reason downtown exists; passenger service ended and the structures and streetscape around them changed, per the railroad guide.
• Wait Avenue as a main street. Before the underpass and Roosevelt Avenue were built, Wait Avenue was the main eastern route into downtown, ending at the freight depot. Today it survives as a remnant, which is why an 1890 commercial building sits on what reads as a side street.
• The industrial employers: Schrader Brothers and Athey arrived in the mid-1960s and Weavexx in the early 1970s, and all are gone, swept away by economic change. The Athey plant survives as the Factory, an adaptive reuse that proved to be the exception.
• Seminary-era demolitions: after the college left in 1956, four old buildings came down as the campus was reworked, and later structures including a health center and student union have themselves since been demolished.
• Forestville, the village that lost the depot in 1874, incorporated defensively in 1879, held that status until 1915 and was eventually annexed; the Forestville guide covers what's left.

Why the losses cluster where they do

Three forces account for nearly everything on this list. Fire took the wooden downtown and Wait Hall. Indifference took the North Brick House and the Normal and Industrial School, both demolished in eras when neither the architecture nor the history was valued. And economic change took the industry and the depot, since buildings outlive their purposes only when someone finds a new one. The counter-examples prove the rule: the Calvin Jones House survives because a garden club organized in 1956 to move it instead of letting it fall, per the museum guide, and the Ailey Young House survives because a 2008 survey found it and the town committed to restoration.

Which makes this guide, finally, an argument. Wake Forest is adding thousands of residents and rebuilding whole quadrants, per the growth guide, and the buildings most at risk are always the ones that look ordinary and unproductive right now, exactly as the North Brick House and the school campus once did. The town's Historic Preservation Commission, its local landmark designations and its cemetery survey work, described in the cemetery guide, exist because of this list. Walk the markers tour and the downtown loop with the vanished buildings in mind, and the surviving ones stop looking inevitable.