Name-a-Day Calendar, October 17: Wake Forest Demon Deacons

Page 345 of 365

Chosen in: 1923

Chosen by: It’s not entirely clear

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The Wake Forest Manual Labor Institute was founded in 1834. It owes its name to its original location in a forested area of northern Wake County, North Carolina, just a few miles north of Raleigh. The institute shifted its curriculum away from manual labor and renamed itself Wake Forest College in 1839.

Wake Forest began playing football in 1888, their teams originally known either as the Baptists (they were a Baptist school) or as the Old Gold and Black (their school colors).

How they got the nickname “Demon Deacons” is somewhat unclear and the subject of debate. Andy Wittry did a deep dive on this for NCAA.com last year¹ that gets into way more detail than I will here, but the basic gist is as follows.

Some sources claim the nickname was coined in 1922 after a particularly impressive football win over Duke,² but some wire was obviously crossed here, as that year’s football game between the two rivals was actually a hellish 3-0 win for Duke. When they played the next year, Wake Forest won 16-6, but the nickname had already debuted by then.

In fact, per Wittry, the first time “Demon Deacons” appeared in print was in a preview for that very game against Duke, published in The Bee³—a daily newspaper in Danville, Virginia—on November 1, 1923. The story had no byline. Wake Forest’s student newspaper, the Old Gold & Black, referred to the team as “demon deacons”, lowercase, in their own preview on November 9, then after their team won the game on November 10, they printed “Demon Deacons”, capitalized.

The long and short of it is that we can pinpoint the temporal origin of the nickname to early November 1923, but we can’t confirm the moniker’s originator or determine how it came to be.

A couple weeks shy of a century later, Wake Forest is still known as the Demon Deacons. The nickname has lived through the school’s move to Winston-Salem in 1956 (rendering the school name nonsensical for almost 70 years), its upgrade to university status in 1967, and even its separation from the Baptist Church beginning in 1979.

Wake Forest’s mascot is a costumed Demon Deacon.

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1. Read for yourself.

2. Duke was known as Trinity at the time. I’ll be referring to them by their current name for the sake of convenience.

3. This newspaper has since merged with The Danville Register and is now known as the Danville Register & Bee.