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Last week a White Street merchant
suggested to Commissioner Frank Drake
that the American and North Carolina
flags should again fly in the historic
downtown area, Drake mentioned it to
business owner Bob Johnson who
immediately sent it on to his large
e-mail list, and by the middle of this
week almost everyone in town was on
board with the idea.
“It will get done for sure,”
Johnson said Tuesday.
The object of the collective
gaze is the rusty unused flagpole in
front of the former Wake Forest Post
Office at the corner of South White
Street and East Owen Avenue, now the
home of Dr. Jack Gorlesky’s chiropractic
office. The flagpole has not held a flag
since the new post office was built on
East Holding Avenue in the 1980s.
“Right now,” Johnson said,
“it’s deciding if the pole is
historically significant so we should
keep it versus buying low-maintenance
aluminum.”
He has a list of people
willing to make it a reality. Marc
Duncan of Dundee will sand and paint the
old flagpole if the decision is to
retain it. VFW Post 8466 will provide
the flags. Johnson’s Cotton Company, the
Graham Johnson Cultural Arts Endowment
and Bob Luddy’s Captive Aire will all
make donations and Daryl Cady of Cady
Construction will help with the labor
and costs. Of course, Gorlesky is
willing to allow the project to go
forward and had talked with Tina Archer,
the Downtown Revitalization
Corporation’s executive director,
earlier this year about the possibility
of getting DRC façade grant funds to
refurbish the flagpole.
Among the people who like the idea is
Jean McCamy, a past president of the
Wake Forest Garden Club, who passed the
suggestions and notes on to the current
president, Sue Cascio. “I’ve missed the
flag in that location since the post
office moved away,” McCamy said.
She also suggested it would
be nice to also remove the wallpaper on
an interior wall – the former post
office lobby – to uncover the original
hand-painted mural.
The WPA – the Work Projects
Administration – built the Wake Forest
Post office on South White Street in
1940. It was the office’s first
permanent home. In the early years the
post office had been in the postmaster’s
home – once out of town at Crenshaw Hall
– or in later years in rented spaces
around town.
The WPA was established to
help alleviate the terrible unemployment
of the Depression and was in the
business of providing as much work as
possible to as many people as possible,
including artists. When the WPA built a
post office, it liked to include a mural
about local history.
Harold Egan was chosen as
the artist for Wake Forest, but he had
trouble even starting work because he
could not reach J.R. Wiggin, the
postmaster at the time. In despair, Egan
wrote to the head of the Federal Works
Agency Fine Arts Section in November of
1940: “I have repeatedly tried to get in
touch with the Wake Forest postmaster,
but he has failed to reply to my letters
and telegrams. The only conclusion I can
draw is that the postmaster is either
dead or drunk, perhaps both.” This
impasse must have ended because six
months later Egan wrote that everyone,
including Wiggin, was pleased with the
design and it was nearly complete. |
