The Reynolda waterfall is the first thing I remember seeing when I came to visit Wake Forest in the spring of 2021, a few weeks before I finally committed. At the time, I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of attending Wake Forest. I thought of it primarily as the school that my sister and mother went to — not for me. Instead of excitement, there was a looming sense of inevitability pulling me to Winston-Salem. It was not until I walked through Reynolda Village with my mom and we stopped on the bridge above the waterfall to discuss her time at Wake Forest that I began to see things differently. Recognizing the waterfall as something truly special that Wake Forest had to offer, I felt all of a sudden like I was choosing my future, and it made me excited to move to Winston-Salem. After all, how many college students can say they have a waterfall on their campus?
Now an iconic Wake Forest symbol, the Reynolda waterfall began more or less as an afterthought in the construction of Lake Katherine. It was originally designed as a two-arch dam to stop the flow from Silas Creek, creating the lake that Katherine Reynolds saw as the key to her and her husband’s future.
Reynolds was determined to construct a lake as early as 1910, before her family bungalow had even been built, let alone lived in. Where others saw an unruly wetland, Reynolds envisioned a sixteen-acre body of water that would one day be at the heart of the estate. It would assist the complex irrigation system necessary to sustain the gardens and the fields. Fishing in its depths would provide both sustenance and a diversion for workers. It would be the perfect site for boating and garden parties, for conveying to their guests the splendor and magnitude of their novel wealth.
It was the picturesque and the practical that Reynolds was after, and it was both she would have: over only a few years and at the expense of nearly $400,000 in today’s money, her extravagant dream was realized. A page in the October 1917 issue of House Beautiful Magazine was set aside to celebrate the lake’s completion, reporting that “sixty thousand dandelion bulbs were naturalized around this lake, and in blossoming time the place is thronged with visitors.”
The lake soon became a pillar of the community. As Camilla Wilcox writes, “It seems that almost everyone who lived in Winston-Salem during that time has some special memory of the lake.” These memories range from the everyday to the momentous. For example, on May 25, 1921, “an estimated 5,000 people, seated on the slope from the main house,” gathered to watch local children stage a pageant on the shore of the lake. The Winston-Salem Journal described the performance as “one of the most beautiful outdoor events in the history of Winston-Salem.” Or on July 5, 1932, when a birthday party hosted at the Lake Katherine Boathouse ended with the still unsolved death of Zachary Smith Reynolds.
Of course, the Lake Katherine that was so beloved in its Roaring Twenties glory is almost unrecognizable in the wetlands it has become today. This regression was a natural, inevitable process that would have required constant maintenance to counteract. As soon as the lake was completed, it was already slowly filling up with silt and sediment deposited by Silas Creek and other waterways flowing into it. When Wake Forest University arrived in the 1950s, extra runoff from campus construction exacerbated the existing disregard for the preservation of the lake. By the 1960s, it was full of mud, and nature has reigned supreme ever since.
There is no waterfall in Reynolda without Lake Katherine, and yet the waterfall alone remains, essentially unchanged. From that first visit, it has continued to be a temporal landmark that helps me keep my memories in order. When I first got to Wake Forest, I would only encounter it in passing, in the middle of my runs through the Reynolda trails, or when my friends and I would go to Reynolda Village for boba tea. During my sophomore year, however, I began to appreciate it much more. I would walk to the waterfall late at night, especially on weekends, where I could sit and let its roar drown out my anxious thoughts. At night, there is a lethargic magic resonant in the waterfall’s hum, and I have drifted off to it on multiple occasions.
According to Bari Helms of the Reynolda House, it was used by members of the church at Five Row to perform baptisms. During my junior year, I began to see the space as hallowed ground as well, inextricably linked to some of the most important people in my life and to the spiritual growth I had achieved as a person. This confusing amalgamation of human construction and nature’s will had won me over. This monument — somehow rooted in history and yet convincingly timeless, always rippling movement and yet going nowhere — had taught me so much. But it was time to go home, and then to go abroad in the spring. I spent much of my last night in North Carolina at the waterfall. I shed painful tears when I had to say goodbye, to the waterfall and all that it represented at the time.
I have had some of the most important conversations of my life there — topics ranging from quantum mechanics and neuroscience to Bob Dylan and The Beats, from nostalgic recapitulations of the past to shared fears for the future. Awkward silences are wonderfully nullified in the calming presence of the waterfall. Walls are set aside, at least for a moment. Language sprouts unexpectedly in the cracks that are normally sealed off by conventions and time constraints. Wide distances in background and opinion are collapsed, and memories imprint themselves in strange ways.
Wake Forest is saturated with natural beauty. I love how the light sifts through the trees during golden hour, spreading a soft blanket of sun on the Davis Field grass. The dramatic sunsets to the tune of roaring cicadas, the white blooms of the Magnolia trees and falling leaves — all of this beauty is, for me, distilled in the waterfall, which is the epitome of our unique blessings as Wake Forest students.
It is a place for everyone: for lovers and for loners; for grandparents and for toddlers; for the stoned and the sloshed; for the broken-hearted and the triumphant; for me and for you. Since it was built in 1912, it has been a place where employees on the Reynolda estate could swim and fish, where college students can go for a little solace and where families can enjoy nature with their children.
I have fallen asleep to the melody of the cascading water. I have waded in its pools and let its current crash over me in the moonlight. I have written countless awful poems sparked by a moment of strange illumination sitting on that bench sinking in the sand. I have made the most of some of the best that Wake Forest has to offer. Whether it be a waterfall or a fallen log, I encourage you to find your nook in Reynolda and make it your home.
