Got a few fairly similar stories about racing on some of the less traveled roads on the Wake Co/Granville Co border north of Raleigh. I'm gonna skip the details though :0)
2019-Whenever Misc. Grab Bag Thread
- Thread starter jeffbear
- Start date
LJG
Well-known member
I don't have any racing stories, but have a good one about a cop knocking on my door one morning. However, I don't know if the statute of limitations has expired. Suffice it to say, he didn't know about what I was hiding.
This place is damned sure not what it was in 1973 when we arrived here through RDU. Does anyone other than JB or PLL remember Falls of the Neuse as a 2 lane road?
I lived not far from there in the late 80s and can confirm. There were more than a few long-ish dead ends from when they built Jordan Lake too. Now I get to hear the idiots racing along Atlantic Ave/Litchford/Gresham pretty much every night. Morons with cars find a way. Always have, always will
perfectstormhits
Well-known member
When I moved here in 1992, that widening to Strickland was finishing up. There were still barrels blocking the outside lane. And Lead Mine ended at Strickland.
My boss lived off Creedmoor and Strickland in NW Raleigh, just inside the city limit. I used his sister and brother in law as my realtors. They lived in North Hills, which he said was the country when they moved there but even then, he considered it downtown.
Yeah this re-branding of North Hills as "midtown" kills me because that used to be this weird enclave kind of in the middle of suburban nowhere. Back in the 70s and early 80s the city itself sort of petered out on the west at Crabtree (and the Fairgrounds) and on the north at Old Wake Forest Rd. Falls was just an alternate route north between US1 (Capital) and NC50 (Creedmoor). The old Cheviot Hills golf course at Gresham and Capital (now Capital Hills where all the auto dealer are) used to be the freaking wilderness and my Mom never stopped complaining about dragging me "all the way out there" for youth events and stuff. Same with the old Wildwood Country Club that became Wildwood Green. If you asked her to drive to Wake Forest she acted like we needed a passport. None of that was more than a 20 minute drive from the house when we lived on Blue Ridge Rd behind Crabtree. Now the city all sort of just rolls into and past all that stuff with very little interuption
When I first moved here, we were looking for a front porch swing. There was a Lowe’s/Builders Square/HQ in the plaza at Capital and Wake Forest. Except the address in the Yellow Pages said it was on North Blvd. I called the store to find out where they were and the operator laughed and said they needed to get the listing changed. When did North Blvd. become Capital Blvd.?
Fayettenamcanesfan
Well-known member
Thanks. I moved to Raleigh in 1992, it must have taken a while for the Yellow Pages to catch up.
Yeah, the listings had to be changed by the businesses that paid for them. It took FOREVER for some of them to get updated. Also, pretty sure that Lowe's had been a Moore's Lumber until a few years before that time. So, that wouldn't have helped matters much. Believe it or not kids, there was a time when there wasn't a Lowe's at every major entryway to town, and Home Depot was only a regional building supply store in Georgia and Florida.
We lived in Cary when we first got married and the first stub of Cary Parkway opened like the 2nd or 3rd year we were there ... like 88-89-90, somewhere in there. Even then, the new bit only ran to Kildaire Farm Rd. They renamed the section after that ... nothing on the other side of the Beltline. It used to be all sorts of trouble to get on the Beltline in the morning, but the population exploded after they started on the Parkway and we bugged out.
LJG
Well-known member
You mean Wildweed CC???
LJG
Well-known member
Wasn't there one at the K-Mart plaza at Old Wake Forest and Six Forks? I have a vague memory of one there until the mid-90s when I bought my first little house in Oakdale, which is anther place totally changed. Or fucked, as I prefer to think of it.
LJG
Well-known member
Did you know any Brueggemans? They were family friends and lived another mile or so down Strickland.
I used to be able to ride a bike from North Ridge out to there and not get killed.
My sisters and I swam for Fairfax Hills way back then.
dwind
Well-known member
The kildaire antique barn was the corner and back aways of where Cary parkway and kildaire farm road are today. The other side of kildaire farm road was gardens for the kildaire farm Residents. The they started putting apartments and houses in each side of where cart parkway was gonna go and sold the houses saying cary parkway will never be built.
Pucking Lamplighter
Well-known member
People used to race on the Stone Road (now Davis Drive) between Morrisville & Apex, when there was a distance between the two. Stone Road was 2 lanes and it dead ended less than a mile from the Morrisville-Carpenter Road intersection and ended up at a T with Salem Church Road on the south end. It ran beside the RR tracks and was sort of straight for a ways where everybody used to race. I used to work tobacco around Carpenter for the princely sum of $2.12 an hour when the minimum wage was $1.79/hr.. I was the only white guy on the crew. My fist job as a kid was out where Kildaire Farm Rd. and 1010 cross. I made a penny a pair for picking tobacco horn worms and filling up quart mason jars with them. There was an old counrty store called Brownie's on a stacked field rock foundation at that intersection. I used to play and fish around Kildaire Farm when it was a working dairy barn & Kildaire Farm Road was still dirt in places. It doesn't seem like that long ago, but now it's a different world...couldn't tell you where the nearest working dairy farm was from there.
We used to swim, party, hunt & fish around Lake Ass (Fred G. Bond Metro Park) when there was nothing but woods along High House Road. Same for the reservoir surrounded by apartments at Carpenter Village when that was all tobacco fields off the Stone Rd..We called it Lake Ass, Jr.. Nobody gave a $#!t as long as we didn't leave trash or break bottles.
Jim
We used to swim, party, hunt & fish around Lake Ass (Fred G. Bond Metro Park) when there was nothing but woods along High House Road. Same for the reservoir surrounded by apartments at Carpenter Village when that was all tobacco fields off the Stone Rd..We called it Lake Ass, Jr.. Nobody gave a $#!t as long as we didn't leave trash or break bottles.
Jim