In 1950 the village of Falls was a small mill town where most of the residents either worked at the Erwin Mills plant on the river or had some connection to the mill. Many Falls residents lived in the mill houses lining what is now called Fonville Road, stepping up the hill toward the water tank.
It was a community that seemed a long way from Raleigh or Wake Forest. There was no school – children went to Wake Forest or Millbrook – and Bruce Fonville ran the general store.
“We were just isolated out here,” Linwood Barham said.
When a house or other building caught fire, the volunteers from Bay Leaf Fire Department would come, Linwood’s wife, Barbara, remembered, but it was five miles and the damage had usually been done by the time they arrived in a homemade truck Ollie Holiday had built.
She remembered a fire in the house next to her grandparents’ home when she was a child. The work at the mill stopped while the workers and everyone who could turned out to form a brigade, passing buckets of river water up to the fire near the top of the hill. They also stripped her grandparents’ house of furniture and took out the wiring, the windows and the doors to save what they could in case it caught fire.
The community certainly knew how to work together. In the early 1950s, they raised the money to build a small community house on the new Falls Road that skirts the hill.
Linwood Barham remembers that the management at Erwin Mills, which owned much of the Falls property, gave the land for the community house with the stipulation that the property would revert to the company if the building was no longer used as a community house.
“I remember selling hot dogs at the mill, helping with suppers” to build the community house, Nina Barham, a relative, said.
But there was still no fire department although Linwood said there had been an earlier effort that failed.
Then in the late 1960s Barbara was a leader in the Home Extension Club, and that year “We had to have a community project.” She talked it over with her pastor and others and decided. “I said we need a fire department.”
“I decided I would take it on as a project,” Linwood said. “I remember going around getting Bruce Fonville and Eric Holmes to be on the board.”
Other husbands and community members joined the effort, and they held a barbecue supper that raised $600. “That was enough to buy an old truck that Durham Highway was selling,” Barbara said.
The men started training as firemen and the women’s auxiliary held bake sales, sold hot dogs and chicken pastry. “Nobody was rich. We had to work real hard,” Barbara said.
The Falls Fire Department was formally incorporated in 1970 with a district established by the county, and volunteers built bays for the trucks in front of and as an addition to the community house. Until very recently, it was run entirely by volunteers.
The mill, built about 1855 to produce paper, closed in 1959. The village remained much the same until the 1970s when the U.S. Corps of Engineers began buying land for Falls Lake and for the dam just above the bridge over the Neuse River. Families had to leave their homes along Possum Track Road, and the character of the village was totally altered. Now the Raleigh city limits abut some of the old mill houses that have been renovated and updated by newcomers and old Falls families. Linwood and Barbara Barham live in what was her grandparents’ house.