January 11, 2005

Published in Wake Forest, NC

            I have yet to hear of any plans, and I know other towns have given themselves as much as five years to plan a centennial.

            Of course, the town’s birth was not celebrated in any fashion either. It was a charter change by the North Carolina General Assembly that changed the name from the Town of Wake Forest College established in 1880 when there were 456 inhabitants to the Town of Wake Forest.

            A question of semantics? Not really, more one of finance and the college’s desires. The General Assembly had authorized bonds to build an electric generation plant in February. College officials wanted to do away with the coal-oil and kerosene lamps and candles students were using for their studies.

            The first meeting of the reconstituted board of commissioners with the same faces was on March 1 of 1909. They held an election on April 12 about whether to issue $15,000 in bonds to build the electric plant. Out of a population of 1,225 there were 109 registered voters, white males who had paid their poll taxes. Eighty-eight voted yes, one no.

            Things did not go smoothly. The Chicago firm handling the bond sale said the town had to have extra money for two interest payments, and the town told firms to delay shipping the equipment. The board voted to borrow $500, apparently from the student loan fund at the college. Later, in January of 1910, Mrs. J.H. Gorrell loaned the town $1,000 to complete the plant’s construction.

            Somehow it was built, a little direct-current generator in the new brick building on Elm Avenue. (You can still see the faint letters “Water Lights,” but it is now part of the Bright Funeral Home complex.) The generator was fired, at least at first, with sawdust from a lumber mill nearby.

            Not everyone could afford the new electric lights; most people had just one or two, and other new gadgets such as refrigerators or fans were slow in coming to a town where most people lived on much less than $500 a year, which was a professor’s salary.

            The late Dr. I. Beverly Lake Sr. said it was 1915 before his family, when they moved from the corner of Pine and North College into a house on North Main Street, had electricity. “It was a great evening for all of us.” But his mother still used an ice box, supplied with a cake of ice every morning by Mr. Penny from the ice plant downtown. “I was a grown man when Mother got an electric refrigerator.”

            The minimum charge for electricity was $1.25 a month. If you had two lights and did not use more than 754 kilowatts a month you paid just that $1.25. However, if you had not paid your bill by the 10^th of the month, you were cut off and the reconnection charge was $1.50.

            Ah, maybe we do not care to remember all this. What a shame that would be.