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Wake Forest University will welcome 1,400 first-year students to town Wednesday.

So, as our welcome to them, we’ll explain why the Hearn Plaza, formerly the Quad, gets rolled with toilet paper when the university’s sports teams win.

The tradition of “rolling the quad” — covering the center of the campus with streamers of white tissue — has been in place at least as far back as 1961, a few years after the university’s 1956 move from the town of Wake Forest to Winston-Salem.

“On the old campus, students used to ring the bell in Wait Hall, an administration building,” Ed Hendricks, a professor of history at Wake Forest who died in 2015, said in a 2006 article. “There was a bell pull that anyone could access, including students. When the university moved here, there were bells in Wait Chapel but no bell pull. Students had to find a new way to celebrate.”

Before Wake Forest’s move, according to that article, students at Reynolds High School had been rolling trees to celebrate victories, and Wake students, some of whom were RJR alumni, may have adopted that tradition.

“At first, students were the primary rollers, but as the tradition became more firmly established, alumni and their families also raced to Hearn Plaza (the quad) to be among the first to drape the trees in white,” according to the article.

When we addressed this question before, Wake Forest’s Office of Sustainability described the tradition as “certainly wasteful” but that “from an environmental perspective, it is relatively benign.”

Other schools have similar traditions, often around homecoming time or when their team wins a major game.

Most are held outdoors, during the celebrations after a game victory or in the dead of night. But at the beginning of each men’s basketball season at John Brown University in Arkansas, there is something called “The TP Game,” in which students celebrate the team’s first points by throwing hundreds of rolls of toilet paper onto the court.

As to where the whole tradition of throwing toilet paper into trees started in the first place, that’s lost to history. One practical joker started it as a cheap, quick way of pranking someone, and others followed suit.

Toilet paper on a roll has been around since 1890, when it was introduced by the Scott Paper Co. SAM guesses the prank came along soon thereafter.

It’s technically littering, and could also be considered trespassing in some places, but many people view it as harmless mischief.

Q: We were looking for a home in Springfield Village and saw what looks to be a cemetery in the middle of Harper Springs Drive in Clemmons. Any idea of what it is? There are quite a few old headstones.

Answer: The cemetery is the Boyer-Harper Cemetery. The area where it’s located is now Springwood Farms subdivision, but it was originally a family farm owned by the Boyer and Holder families.

According to Findagrave.com there are 12 marked graves and several unmarked graves and fieldstones. The graves are from the 19th century and are becoming illegible.

The oldest marked grave is Zephaniah Harper who was born in 1750 and died in 1830. The most recent is Anna Holder Boyer, who was born Oct. 21, 1811, and died June 9, 1889.

Melissa Hall, Straight Answer Ma’am

Write: Ask SAM, 418 N. Marshall St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101

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