Exterminator in Wake Forest, NC

Local Knowledge

Two Centuries of Timber Is a Specific Kind of Job

Last updated: September 4, 2026

Wake Forest is the old-wood town of northern Wake County. Its historic district, on the National Register since December 2003, runs from about 1820 to 1953 and is built around the original Wake Forest College campus — founded in 1834 on Dr. Calvin Jones’s plantation — together with the houses that went up around it for faculty, staff and students. The college left for Winston-Salem in 1956 and the Seminary has held the central campus since. Old buildings fail in predictable places: sills and floor joists sit closest to the damp and go first, porch posts take direct rain, and powderpost beetles riddle seasoned hardwood floors and trim, leaving a flour-fine dust rather than anything dramatic.

The important point about treating a historic house is that subterranean termites live in the soil, so the soil is what gets treated. A liquid termiticide barrier goes into the ground at the footings, and where the construction suits it we use in-ground bait stations that foraging workers empty back into the colony. Nothing needs to be done to original paneling, trim or floors. The threat here is the native eastern subterranean termite, not Formosan — NC State Extension confines those to Brunswick and Rutherford counties — and on two-hundred-year-old timber the native species is quite enough.

It would be misleading to present Wake Forest as only a historic district. The town has grown substantially north and east of the old campus, and those streets have the opposite profile: young slabs, thin landscaping, disturbed soil and fresh exterior timber, which means fire ants on open turf, wasps on new eaves, and the question of whether the pre-construction termite treatment survived the landscaping that followed. We treat both halves of the town, and they rarely need the same thing. Selling either kind of house? North Carolina closings use the state WDIR-100 report, and on older stock it is worth doing early.

The Town’s own landmark descriptions read almost as an inspection list. The Battle-Purnell House, built by Josiah Battle in 1802 and 1803 and designated a local landmark in 2002, is described as sitting on a high stone basement, clad in plain weatherboards, with flush eaves and nine-over-nine wood-sash windows. Every one of those is a known failure point: a stone basement holds damp against the sills, weatherboard joints open as they age, and flush eaves throw no water clear of the wall at all — so the wall takes every storm. That is the difference between inspecting a house of this era and inspecting one from 2015.