Town of Wake Forest, NC history

By 1920 other businesses downtown included the Bolus Department Store, the Wilkinson General Store, Dickson Brothers Dry Goods, Brewer & Sons feed and grocery store, and Keith's Grocery Store.

When the College celebrated its centennial in 1934, there were forty-one faculty members.

A new era in the life at the College began at the end of the war when the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation offered funds to operate the school partially if it moved to Winston-Salem as the medical school had done in 1941.

To supplement the loss of enrollment, the College changed its admission policy in 1943 and for the first time began admitting women on a full-time basis, a change that altered campus life dramatically.

Happily, the Southern Baptist Convention decided to locate its new seminary in Wake Forest, and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary shared the campus with the college until it moved in 1956.

In 1984 the Wake Forest town board voted to annex a substantial area, including Forestville.

The campus was turned into the Southeastern Theological Seminary, still in operation today, and Forestville was eventually annexed by Wake Forest in 1988.

In 1995 the commissary building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and Jim Adams and Steve Gould received an Anthemion Award for the project.

The surrounding housing village was designated as the Glen Royall Mill Village Historic District and listed on the National Register on August 27, 1999.

2000 was probably the starting point, for it was then that Andy Ammons bought the land and built the extension of Rogers Road which connected his new subdivision, Heritage Wake Forest, to South Main Street.

Wake Forest celebrated its 100th birthday throughout 2009 with a series of special events that began with First Light Wake Forest on Dec.

That annual growth continued such that there were almost twice as many Wake Foresters in 2010 – 30,818.