Marcus Baxter Dry, the longest serving Cary High School principal never built a house for his family to live in, but he oversaw the building of two Cary High School buildings that had profound effects on education locally and statewide. Read on to learn more about Dry’s life, his personal home, and his influence on education represented by two brick high school buildings and more.

The House on the Corner

Marcus Baxter Dry House; photograph courtesy of the author

The Marcus Baxter Dry House has sat at the corner of Dry Avenue and Faculty Drive in downtown Cary overlooking the Cary Arts Center and Cary High School for 125 years or more. For more than 30 years it was the home of Professor Marcus Baxter Dry, the longest serving principal of Cary High School and beloved community member, and his family. The house is a good example of a one-story “Triple A” cottage with Victorian features, typical of houses across Wake County and in Cary. The house is dated circa 1900 and features details such as a wrap-around porch and patterned shingles in the gables with lancet-shaped louvers. Its simplicity and lack of ostentatious features belie the accomplishments and impact on education rendered over 50 years by Professor Dry. We’ll talk about his remarkable life and the campus buildings in a bit, but first, let’s explore the history of the land and his personal home.

The Land & House

The Dry Family property was part of much larger acreage once owned by Frank Page, who set aside four acres of this large parcel on a high spot at the end of South Academy Street for use as school grounds for the newly formed town. Page understood the value of education, and he wanted both his own children and the children in his newly formed town to have the opportunity of a solid education. Trees were felled on the “school lot” as it was known and milled into lumber at his sawmill. The two-story school was completed and ready to begin classes in January 1870, over a year before the town was officially incorporated. The date 1896 in the image below refers to the year that the school passed out of the hands of the Rufus H. Jones family and to stockholders.

Jerry Miller drawing for Cary High School

Courtesy of Cary High School Archives

After the school was built, Page still owned land in the surrounding area, and the land adjacent to the school lot was sold in smaller parcels over the years and descended through numerous hands. In 1901, the widow Mrs. Elizabeth Quince Petteway bought the property now located at the corner of Dry Avenue and Faculty Drive, a parcel which at that time comprised four acres. The map below shows Mrs. Petteway’s house on the 1906 map drawn from recollections of Terrine Holleman Woodlief and Marvin T. Jones, both long time Cary residents and early graduates of Cary High School.

Mrs Petteway’s daughter Kate was married to William H. Butt who was from Wake County. He had been a farmer early on in his working life and had acquired large tracts of land around Cary. In the 1900 Census, The Butt family and Mrs. Petteway lived in the same household in Cary. Was the family living in what became known as the Dry House? There is no way to know for sure, but there are no homes on this map for the Butt family. Around 1905 – 1910, Mr. Butt changed careers, beginning work as an engineer for the Seaboard Airline Railroad (SAL.) The Butts along with Mrs. Petteway were found in Hamlet, a hub of the SAL, in the 1910 Census. Sadly, Mrs. Petteway passed away in 1915, still owning her Cary property. Her heirs sold the 4-acre property to M. B. Dry in 1917 for $2600.00. By that time, the Dry family had been in Cary for nine years. The deed explained that the land was sold to fulfill payment of legacies outlined in Mrs. Petteway’s will.

The Drys Move to Cary, But Not to the Dry House

Although the house is known locally as the long-time residence of the Dry family, they clearly lived elsewhere for a while. Other details about where the Dry family lived when they first came to Cary were found in The Cary News newspaper article in 1990. Dry’s son, William Henry Dry recounted, “When they [his parents] came to Cary from Wingate, they couldn’t find a place to live. They lived in the girls’ dormitory, and that’s where I was born.” William was born in August 1908, so he would have been born soon after his parents arrived in Cary for Mr. Dry to take on the principalship of Cary High School.

Girls’ Dormitory 1916

William Dry went on to explain that the family lived in several homes around Cary, and for a time lived in what was then called the Walker Hotel. He told this anecdote, “When I was just a little fellow the first paddling I ever got was for putting rocks on the railroad track,” he said with a laugh. “I must have been about three.” William was three around 1911, so it appears the family was still in transition and not yet in the Dry House.

The article went on, “Later, [my] father bought the house which now sits at the corner of Dry Avenue and Faculty Drive, right across from the school. The Dry family made that their permanent home. That house is over 100 years old… [as of 1990] We moved into it I think when I was six or seven…” This would have been about 1915. So perhaps, the Drys rented the house until the heirs of Mrs. Petteway were able to execute her will and fulfill the legacies, with the sale taking place in 1917. In the photo below, a young man appears on the porch. One guess is that it is William Dry, who would have been around 12 at the time.

The Dry House from the 1920 CHSite, yearbook of Cary High School

Dry's Early Life and Educational Achievements

Now that we know a little bit about the house and land, let’s back up a bit and examine the early life and education of Professor Dry. Marcus Baxter Dry was born in 1871 on his father’s farm near Hopewell Church, Goose Creek Township, Union County, NC which is southeast of Charlotte. Hopewell Church is the top red oval, and the lower oval encircles Unionville, where Dry went to school later on.

He learned the value of hard work on the farm, learning to use an ax, mattock, and plow, and run the engine of the steam mill that his father operated.

Photo of the Dry Homestead found on the Ancestry family tree: AngelaDryGarrett

His early education started at local schools: the Old Field (or Friends) School, Hopewell Church School and the Faulks School. He went on to preparatory school at Union Institute, graduating in 1892.

Photo from https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~jganis/genealogy/unionco/photos/main.html

His course of study was so rigorous that he enrolled at Wake Forest College in 1893 as a sophomore and graduated in 1896, just three years later, with a Master of Arts degree and as Valedictorian and Poet of his class. He also served as an editor of and writer for “The Wake Forest Student” newspaper. No yearbook photographs exist online for Wake Forest College from the 1890s.

Catalogue of Wake Forest College [1892-1905]

Here was his course of study as noted in the catalog listing his graduation:

1896 excerpt from Catalog of WFC 1892-1905

The above abbreviations stand for: Moral Philosophy, Chemistry, Biology, Modern Languages, Greek, Latin, Physics and Applied Mathematics, and English. Clearly, he was a serious and educationally ambitious student.

As a dedicated educator who understood the importance of life-long earning, Dry offered summer schools for teachers at Wingate and later at Cary. Later in his career, he himself attended summer sessions of the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York as well as summer school at the University of North Carolina.  When the farm-life school model started to take hold across the state, Dry entered A & M (now NCSU) Summer School for farm-life men, attending three summers and applying himself to subjects such as soil, fertilizers, agronomy, animal husbandry, dairying, poultry, horticulture, botany, bacteriology, etc. All this study converted him to the farm-life idea that he implemented later at Cary High School.

Early Teaching Career

Before he arrived in Cary to teach, Dry had years of teaching and school administration experience under his belt. Although Dry’s own educational experience has been previously outlined, what wasn’t mentioned was that while he was at the Union Institute and Wake Forest College, he taught at local schools near his home when he was not in school himself, such as in the summer and between terms. These would have been small, one teacher community

schools. It should be pointed out that in these “one teacher schools” there may have been little to no equipment, not even a blackboard, many schools being log and chinking structures. Professor Dry recounted, (and you can hear his poetic nature coming out) “No desks, no tablets or pencils, no toilet arrangements of any kind! …Wide was the fireplace and scanty was the light that came in through the diminutive window. The shrunken floor-boards admitted an abundance of fresh air from beneath the building.”

Example of a log cabin school found in:

https://piedmonttrails.com/2021/04/15/the-rural-little-schools/

1896 was a year of change for Dry and his family. Late in 1896, for reasons unknown, Henry Dry, Marcus Dry’s father sold his land and moved, along with his wife and younger children to Texas. Marcus stayed behind after graduating from Wake Forest College earlier in the year, in May, and he assumed the principalship of the newly organized Wingate School in Union County where he served for twelve years. Wingate School was about 15 or so miles, as the crow flies, from his now former home in Goose Creek. At Wingate, he simply taught, in his own words, “practically everything I had studies at college” at Wake Forest. Because there was no state oversight for curriculum choices, he devised the following curriculum for his high school students: “four years of English, four years of Mathematics including both Plane and Solid Geometry, four years of History, five years of Science, embracing Physiology, Physical Geography, Physics, Geology and Astronomy, one year of French, one of Greek, and four of Latin… Pupils got a big doses of Spelling, Penmanship, Composition Writing, and had speaking pieces that were presented Friday afternoons. Two debating societies were maintained…”

Wingate School from: https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~jganis/genealogy/unionco/photos/main.html

According to a biographical sketch of Professor Dry in the book “Historical Raleigh” published in 1908, “The [Wingate] school had just been established in 1896…the attendance at Wingate grew from a small local patronage to an enrollment of three hundred pupils, one-third of whom were boarding students. Here is Professor Dry with many of his students in the 1900-1901 school catalog. This is the earliest photograph of Dry that has been located so far.

“A community grew up around the school, taking on the proportions of a village… The school made the town.” That sounds very much like the trajectory of Cary Academy/Cary High School. Both Wingate and Cary were served by the railroad, making travel for boarders easier and town development possible.

Personal Events at Wingate

In 1904, at the age of 33, Marcus Baxter Dry married 18-year-old Wilma Anne Perry of Monroe, NC. They had met when she was a student at Wingate. Her extended family lived around the Wingate area, so it would have been an obvious choice for her to attend the local co-educational school.

1904 Wedding Photo of Marcus Baxter Dry and Wilma Anne Perry

gift to Cary High School from Charlotte Dry Keuhn of Aiken, SC,

granddaughter of the Drys

Their first child, Helen Marshall Dry, was born in 1905, and Wilma was expecting their second child when, in 1908, Professor E. L. Middleton retired from Cary High School as Cary transitioned from a private to a public high school. Professor Dry was elected to replace him. Lots of changes were on the way.

Shortly after arriving in Cary, Wilma gave birth to their second child, William Henry Dry in August of 1908, as mentioned above.  Here is a photo, again from Charlotte Dry Keuhn, showing Dry, Wilma, the oldest daughter Helen and baby William. The photo dates to 1909, shortly after the Drys moved to Cary.

Dry's Educational Philosophy

The News and Observer, July 27, 1924, pg. 60

Under Dry’s direction, Cary High School became a model for the development of North Carolina’s public school system that took place in the 1920s. Not only was the school an architectural model, but teaching professionals from across the state came to Cary to learn the secrets of student success. After the completion of the first brick school building, Dry started implementing what may be called “adaptive education.” An article authored by Dry in 1924 explained why so many educators came to view Cary High School. He began:

“I have seen boys and girls become interested in these subjects (agriculture and home economics) and stay in school through four years who without doubt would have had a brief and unhappy high school career if they had been compelled to study Latin or some of the higher mathematics… To say that the vocational courses are light, flimsy, namby-pamby stuff, requiring no real effort on the part of the pupil, is missing the mark very widely… To graduate in one of these courses means work, and it is work that counts for something when it is done…” He used a both/and approach to educational choice: college prep as well as vocational courses with diplomas.

This philosophy of education drove him as a pioneer in curriculum development, and his goal was to make the school a working partner with Cary’s rural community. He established the E. L. Middleton Farm-Life Department with a 13-acre farm and Home Economics department (1914) offering diploma courses in both. He also pioneered vocational training for mentally handicapped children, a teacher training department (1922) during a time of teacher shortages along with public school music and band.

He also introduced a commercial department (1924) and developed a robust physical education department. He started a local “Betterment Association,” the forerunner of the Parent-Teacher Association which enabled him to provide hot lunches for children.

The physical plant of Cary High School expanded on its original four acres as curriculum expanded and enrollment grew. Dry laid the first brick in each of the brick buildings built from 1913 to 1939 to turn the “school lot” into a quadrangle style campus. The Frank Page Dormitory for Girls (1916) replaced a wooden structure lost to fire, a boys dormitory (1920) which later became the “teacherage” housing teachers and their families on campus, the Walter Hines Page Vocational Building (1922), and a new elementary school building (1927). The Templeton Gymnasium (1925), the first gym in a rural high school, joined the campus buildings, and the football field was built on additional acreage to complete the campus (1928.)

The above two photographs from the 1929 CHSite yearbook

Changes On the Way

But educational trends were changing the landscape. The trend in North Carolina in the late 1920s was for consolidated high schools. From the site Ncpedia.org:

"School consolidation was a trend that developed in North Carolina immediately following World War I as state and local leaders sought to improve the quality of rural public schools. Parents of children in rural districts served by one- and two-teacher schools began to demand educational advantages more comparable to those in towns and cities. Leaders tried to accomplish this in many cases by consolidating several small districts into one…”

There was some resistance to overcome:

“People in rural communities often resisted efforts to close small neighborhood schools in exchange for larger and better-equipped facilities.” Rural areas looked askance at higher taxes, loss of local autonomy, and less personal rapport between students and teachers."

Over time, “proponents of the consolidation movement were successful in convincing voters of the benefits of home economics, agriculture, and other vocational courses not found in the smaller schools. Consolidation also allowed many rural communities to have high schools for the first time, as well as teachers with specialized training in academic subjects… as well as “more competitive athletic teams, which had an undeniable influence on school and community spirit.”

A local example of a consolidated school was Green Hope School established in 1927. Three small communities near Highway 55 consolidated their three schools. The names of these communities were Green Level, Carpenter, and Upchurch all in western Wake County.

Green Hope School 1927-1963

For Cary High School in 1927, consolidation signaled the end of high school dormitories for boarding students, with school buses in outlying areas able to carry students to schools much closer to their homes. These rural high schools were generally brick, with laboratories, libraries and other attractive features for a broad education. What did Dry think about these changes? Admittedly, Dry saw the advantages of tuition-based schools. He observed that the students studied harder and were better controlled (or disciplined, probably due to parental pressure over tuition money being well spent,) but he also saw the advantage of the local consolidated schools which offered tuition-free schooling in reach of all, “even if some students were indifferent,” in his words. It was also a benefit for students in rural areas who had limited access to the educational and cultural benefits of schooling. He oversaw that change at Cary High School and was able to maintain Cary’s reputation for excellence during and after the transition. He even stated firmly that “the consolidated school is the best type of school that has ever been devised for a rural people.” Here is a photo of buses that were used for student transport in the greater Cary area.

Honoring Thirty Years of Service

In 1938, Dry was lauded at a banquet celebrating his being the oldest principal in point of service in North Carolina, at the oldest public school in North Carolina, and for his 30-year service at Cary High School. The Wake County Superintendent John C Lockhart praised him as “the head schoolmaster, not only of Wake County, but of all North Carolina” and called his record “without parallel in North Carolina.”

In an act of appreciation for his years of service, his Sunday School class, former students, friends, and community members, as well as the school board, presented him with an all-expense paid trip to the Holy Land, including 13 countries along the way. It was a tour that he talked about for the remainder of his life! One of the countries he visited was England, and this anecdote appeared in the newspaper, 20 years after the death of Walter Hines Page. Dry did a little name-dropping…

Yet Another Cary High School, the Third Building

But the project that is his lasting legacy after the accolades of 1938 is the structure that we live alongside even now. Dry did not rest on his laurels. He oversaw, once again, the construction of another brick main high school building. The photo below shows what I think is the basement level of the third Cary High School building, construction underway, with the Teacherage and Dry House in the background. The original brick building had been outgrown and was outdated, and the school board was able to secure funding through the Public Works Administration.

Plaque located in the lobby of the Cary Arts Center

Many people in town confused the PWA with the WPA of the Depression era, a more well-known program of the Depression. Townspeople would joke about the slow rate of construction, at least in their eyes. Today, we would consider the construction to be rapid, having started in 1939 and the building dedicated in 1940, but locals called the entire venture the “We Poke Along!” Here is a photo of the construction.

The building is now known as the Cary Arts Center. In the dedication address for this building, the state superintendent of public instruction said in his knowledge Mr. Dry was the only man who literally wore out a school building. Actually, Professor Dry also wore out the original wood building, too! A News & Observer editorial at the time called this new building “the last word in educational equipment!” To recap, Professor Dry started in the wooden building, advocated for and had built the first brick building in 1913, and did the same again in 1940!

According to a lengthy newspaper article, and in true Cary style, the third Cary High School, whose construction Dry oversaw, was thoughtfully and very well-equipped with state-of-the-art sound-proof rooms for typing and commercial classes, using insulated walls and double thickness of glass and doors. There were projectors (the latest technology) for motion pictures used for teaching and a sound system connected with the superintendent’s office (Professor Dry’s office) that could communicate with every room and could be tuned to the radio in any or all classrooms. The radio system extended to the large auditorium where students could hear national broadcasts on important subjects. Each Friday morning a free motion picture was shown for educational purposes and each Friday afternoon a motion picture was shown for those who wished to remain and pay admission. Cary children and young men and women had the best facility they could hope for, for learning and success. I even found in the Cary High School Archives an International Business Machines diagram for a fire alarm system. That must have been a hint of the impact a couple of decades later that IBM made on Cary!

Although all these accomplishments speak for themselves, there are more to tell! Dry was also a leader in establishing the North Carolina Education Association and was a member of the first state Textbook Commission.

Another side of Professor Dry

You may wonder, did Professor Dry have a life outside of the classroom? It’s hard to believe he had any spare time, having accomplished so much in his teaching career. The students of Cary High School remembered him in 1929 in “his daily pose.” That is the image students had of him… always at work!

But the driving force in his life which he would attest made his accomplishments possible was his life of Christian faith. According to his daughter Hallie Dry, Professor Dry was a deeply religious Christian man who taught the Dry Bible Class at Cary Baptist Church for thirty years. He also served on the board and later as chairman of the Board of Deacons for Cary Baptist Church. He also sang in the choir.

Dry’s Christian values shaped his approach to operating a school. Rachel Dunham was a boarding student who graduated in 1924, and she recounted, “…we always went to Chapel every morning… in the auditorium of the school…Mr Dry always led them [the services]. And he always said the Lord’s Prayer. And he’d read a chapter in the Bible… most of the time it was the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians.” In a tribute after Dry’s death, the writer noted that Dry was “the last word in kindness and gentleness in dealing with his pupils, and yet he was patient and firm in the best kind of discipline…” The write went on to say, “The poet writes, “The teacher lives forever,” and that is very true when a man has built his life into the character of boys and girls for many years.”

He also had a self-deprecating sense of humor. One essay he wrote about his educational philosophy contained this passage:

“Back in the nineties [the 1890’s!] I had been exposed to a liberal quantity of classical learning in the form of Latin and Greek grammar and literature… I can’t now recall even the names of half of them. I imbibed a great dose of mathematical lore, in the form of… differential and integral calculus (whatever that means, though I made close to a hundred on it)…

Many early photographs of Professor Dry captured his serious nature. BUT he was caught on camera with a wry smile on his face when the popular Vaudeville star “Noodles Fagan” visited Cary High School to emphasize the importance of education and character. His message was simple and expanded on Professor Dry’s educational philosophy (AND Frank Page’s big three: hard work, clean living, and education): be polite, be honest, and hustle (which I take to mean work hard). Don’t miss one school session, don’t drink, don’t chew, keep your hands clean and your character clean. This was a fun event for the schoolchildren, but one with a purpose. encouraging children to stay in school. Unlike Queen Victoria, Professor Dry seems to have been amused!

And he could take some gentle ribbing from his students in their “Last Will and Testament” for 1919:

After having suffered from a serious bout of typhoid fever in the late 1890s, with his recovery lasting several months, I’m sure he would have wanted to make sure the students understood the serious nature of the Spanish Influenza, even if they had to endure numerous lectures on the subject!

The End of an Illustrious Career

Dry finished his teaching career by handing in his resignation to the Cary School Board on April 1, 1942. His decision to resign as principal must have been a difficult one. The school newspaper interviewed Professor Dry at the end of his final year, and Dry remarked, “I have been at the work of teaching so long, that I don’t see how I can reconcile myself to stay away from the class room.” Here is a photograph of him from the school newspaper, The Echo. Note he is still wearing his signature high collared shirt and three piece suit.

April 1942 Cary High School Echo newspaper

The couple was honored in May 1942 at a special ceremony following the presentations of diplomas at the 1942 Cary High School graduation with the presentation of a silver coffee set. They were cheered on with a standing ovation by current graduates and hundreds of his former pupils who returned to mark this occasion. Almost the entire audience had attended school under Dry for at least one year during his tenure. At a reception following graduation, congratulatory telegrams and letters from former pupils were read aloud. When asked for remarks, Professor Dry humbly replied, “I should ask my better half to make this speech. Whatever success I have attained has been due to the fact that I married the finest woman in Union County.”

The News and Observer, May 6, 1942

Fortunately for the students and teachers alike, he continued to work as a substitute teacher until 1944 when his health concerns became serious.

Marcus Baxter Dry passed away on January 27, 1946. Former Governor J Melville Broughton delivered the main address at a memorial service in 1947. A bronze memorial plaque was presented to Cary High School honoring his over 50 total years of service in the classroom and to the two communities he served. Broughton said, “The life of Marcus Baxter Dry was not a conspicuous life, it was not a sensational life, but it was a life that, in terms of service, was truly great.”

Continuing to Honor Dry’s Memory

In 1948, a portrait of Professor Dry, painted by Peace College instructor and noted local Morrisville artist, Mabel Pugh was presented to the school. The portrait was restored a few years ago through funds contributed by the Friends of the Page Walker Hotel, Cary’s Historical Society, and the portrait hangs in the Cary Arts Center, the crowning achievement of Dry’s life-long personal investment in public education and the lives of his students.

Here is a photograph of the portrait being given to the school.

Dry’s memory continued to have an impact after his death, and not just in Cary. In 1957, on the 60^th anniversary of the founding of Wingate School, now Wingate University, the Dry Memorial Fountain located between the theater and outdoor amphitheater, was named in memory of Professor Dry.  A campus article noted that the school was founded near a spring which provided water for the school, an important consideration.

The campus chapel was erected in 1964 by the former students of Professor Dry and dedicated in his honor and named the M. B. Dry Memorial Chapel. Today, the chapel serves as an office of Wingate’s minister to students. In 1993, Jerry McGee was named the 13^th president of the university, and a newspaper article printed a photograph of McGee alongside a portrait of the first head of school, a young Marcus Baxter Dry. The portrait based on the circa 1908 photograph also found in the 1915 CHSite yearbook hangs in the Trustee Room overseeing 130 years of Wingate history.

The Wingate portrait and the photograph used to create it.

Here in Cary, when the old, and third, Cary High School, later Cary Elementary and Junior High School and later still Cary Elementary, was replaced with more modern school buildings, the town wisely chose in 2003 to convert this historic site and structure to the Cary Arts Center, and ground for the Cary Arts Center was broken in 2010. Two rooms, The Marcus Dry Room and the Principal’s Hall honor directly or indirectly the man who left a lasting impression on education in Cary.

So here’s to Professor Marcus Baxter Dry. What a remarkable man; what a remarkable imprint on Cary history!