Historic District (North Main / Faculty Avenue)

This is the original town. The old Wake Forest College campus, now the seminary, anchors it. Faculty Avenue has the houses the professors lived in, and North Main runs under oaks that have been there a very long time. About 400 houses stand in the district, built between the 1830s and the 1940s, which covers several completely different ideas of what a house should be. Expect plaster walls and deep porches. Expect also that any exterior change goes through local historic district review. Prices run from the mid $500,000s to well past a million, and the spread has more to do with condition than with size. People buy here because they want to walk to White Street and because they like old houses enough to keep one going.

Where it is

The district covers the oak-lined blocks along North Main and the streets around the seminary campus. Downtown Wake Forest is a walk, not a drive: White Street is a few minutes on foot from most addresses here, and that is the single biggest reason these houses cost what they do. Getting out of town is the other side of the same fact. You are already at the center, so every trip begins in the downtown grid, and at school drop-off and five in the afternoon that takes longer than a map suggests.

What to know if you're moving here

Prices run from about $550,000 to $1.4 million. There is no HOA here, but there is local historic district review, and for an owner that is the thing to understand before making an offer.

• No HOA means no dues, no pool and no common area.
• Exterior work gets looked at before you do it, including windows, siding, porches, fences and additions, and sometimes the answer is no.
• Sometimes the approved version costs more than the one you wanted, and that same review is why the blocks still look the way they do.
• The building years of the 1830s through the 1940s mean two houses on one street can be seventy years apart in framing, wiring and plaster.
• Repairing plaster is skilled work and it is not cheap.
• Schools are Wake Forest Elementary, Wake Forest Middle and Wake Forest High.

What to do if you're visiting

Walk it. That is the honest answer. The oaks, the porches and the way the seminary campus opens up between blocks are the reason to come, and White Street sits at the end of the walk.

• On the stretch in between you pass 727 North Main.
• A short detour to Freddy’s Bottle Shop is worth it if you want to take something home.
• For an evening, Firebox Theatre Company puts on shows in town.
• Community events land at the Alston-Massenburg Center, so check what is on before you drive up.
• Come in fall or early spring, because the porches are the point and in August nobody is sitting on them.