Itâs 43 degrees outside this February Sunday. Itâs grey and rainy, but even in the damp chill, the buds on the serviceberry are close to popping. The rhythm of the rain brings it all back. When you grow up riding bikes through the woods and wading in the cold waters of Smith Creek, the smell of damp earth after a storm never really leaves you.
My family has called the Wake Forest area home since the 1730s. But the isolated, quiet Northern Wake County I was born into, a landscape of county roads and collapsing tobacco barns, is increasingly difficult to find today.
I grew up on the edge of things out on Ligon Mill Road, back when it was still partially dirt and gravel reliably graded by a neighborâs tractor. For years, getting groceries meant a trek into Raleigh, right up until my dad opened the very first Food Lion in Wake Forest in 1988.
In North Carolina, the weather tests your roots. We survived the devastating 1988 tornadoes that wrecked my familyâs tree farm, sawed our way out of Hurricane Fran in 1996, and boiled water on propane grills during the freezing, week-long dark of the 2002 Ice Storm. We got through those days because we looked out for one another.
As the 90s bled into the 2000s, bulldozers arrived. Our woods were paved into subdivisions. In the freshly overturned red clay, weâd find arrowheadsâreminders that we were merely the newest residents on the ancestral homelands of the Lumbee, Tuscarora, Catawba, and Occaneechi peoples. Then, in 2000, the massive Athey Products plant on Main Street, Wake Forestâs largest employer at the time, abruptly shuttered just before Christmas. It felt like the definitive, heartbreaking end of the old blue-collar Wake Forest, making way for a new era of white-collar commuters.
I left for the Navy in 2003 and returned in 2018 to a town utterly transformed. The COVID-19 pandemic only poured gas on that fire, bringing a staggering 9% population explosion in a single year.
Part of the reason Iâm thinking so deeply about these seasons of change is because of what we witnessed at Town Hall this past Tuesday night. We watched our neighbors, people who have anchored this community for decades, plead with the Board of Commissioners against a proposed Municipal Service District expansion, fighting simply for the right to afford to stay here.
We listened to a 70-year-old veteran explain how his property taxes have skyrocketed. We listened to a 71-year-old woman confess she loses sleep trying to make ends meet, ensuring her cats eat better than she does. The modest rural plots of our youth have been replaced by a housing market where median values have jumped from $145,000 in the mid-90s to over $540,000 today.
We arenât a sleepy rural outpost anymore. With major infrastructure projects like the S Line on the horizon, the growth isnât stopping. But we must demand smart, fiscally sound planning from our leadership to manage it.
If we want to truly say our community is welcoming, we have to tackle affordability head-on. We must protect our remaining watersheds, not just to âbe green,â but to preserve our quality of life. Infrastructure handles the growth, but the community supports people. We have to ensure that working families, teachers, first responders, and the kids growing up here today can actually afford to call Wake Forest home tomorrow.
The physical geography of our past has been overwritten. Yet, despite the lost woods and the disappearing farmland, the core of what makes this place special must remain.
Wake Forest is home. Wake Forest is for everyone. Yâall means all.
Tom Baker IV is the publisher of Wake Forest Matters, Wake Forest’s only independent local newsroom. A Wake Forest native, Navy veteran, and intelligence professional, Tom launched Wake Forest Matters to bring serious accountability journalism to his hometown. Tips and story ideas: publisher@wakeforestmatters.com