CityView Magazine

8 July 2021 BILL KIRBY JR. O nce upon a time, you found the old log house nestled under the tall pines and the dogwoods off Raeford Road, and what may have been the most picturesque landscape in this city. e long and circular driveway curled around the large and raised flower bed covered in purple phlox. For John and Sudie Wooten, the cabin between Raeford Road and Breezewood Avenue that John Wooten built in 1939 was home, where they would raise their three daughters, and not to forget Butch and Mr. Brown, the Doberman pinchers forever on guard along the fence line. "My father was a very unique individual and truly a self-made man," Martha Wooten Goetz says. A native of Fremont in Wayne County, where he grew up on a farm, John Wooten eventually found his way to Fayetteville by way of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Raleigh, where he worked as a pharmacist for the Eckerd Drug Store chain. And it was where he would meet the love of his life, Sudie Cloninger, who was from Buncombe County and worked in the cosmetics department. "Mr. Eckerd had a policy that no two employees could date, so when he saw them together at the movies one night, he told them one of them had to be transferred," Martha Goetz says. "Daddy found another position in Fayetteville at Horne's Drug Store on Hay Street, and Mother transferred to Eckerd Drug in Fayetteville." When it came to business, John Wooten had an observant eye. "He noticed that numerous young men got off the train across the street from the drugstore and they had money to buy supplies before starting their basic training at Fort Bragg, which was becoming a bustling military installation preparing for World War II," Martha Goetz says. "ey were given $15 to buy supplies and would go to the drugstore. Daddy realized the boom to come and decided to open his own store. He realized there was a great opportunity to grow the drugstore business." With partner George Markham, he opened Fayetteville Drug Co. downtown and later was a partner in Wooten-Hall Drugstore across the street from what today is the Cameo Art House eater along Hay Street. "When World War II started, soldiers came in his store to buy things they needed before boarding the train downtown to be shipped out to war," Joan Wooten Nicholson says about her father. "e store shelves were almost empty when they le. One of the things they bought was the cough syrup that he made, labeled and sold." John Wooten opened Wooten Drug Co. in 1953 on Haymount Hill. He later opened another Wooten Drugstore along Raeford Road, where his brother-in-law Sam Henrickson owned and managed Henrickson's luncheon counter and soda fountain before the building eventually was destroyed by fire in the late 1950s. BY BILL KIRBY JR. For John and Sudie Wooten, the cabin between Raeford Road and Breezewood Avenue that John Wooten built in 1939 was home, where they would raise their three daughters, and not to forget Butch and Mr. Brown, the Doberman pinchers forever on guard along the fence line. Life in the Log House of Long Ago Today, the old log house is home to His Outreach Worldwide ministry

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