Wedding DJ at The Cotton Company in Wake Forest, NC

The Space

Cotton once moved through this building on the railroad tracks that still run active behind it today. Built in 1914 as the W.W. Holding Cotton Exchange Warehouse, the structure ginned cotton and pressed cottonseed into oil for local farms before Bob and Elizabeth Johnson bought the property in January 2000 and began a phased renovation that earned them the Anthemion Award in 2001 for historic renovation and adaptive reuse. The renovation continued in stages after that: fourteen artist studios opened on the upper floor in March 2001, and a third phase in November 2002 extended the property into an adjacent building with further gallery and studio space.

Upstairs, the loft that once housed The Event Gallery, and later Firebox Theatre, returned to its original purpose as a dedicated event space called The Graham in March 2025. The Graham runs about 5,000 square feet on the second story, kept open with exposed wooden beams and original brickwork left visible rather than covered over during the renovation.

Capacity & Layout

The Graham seats up to 200 guests within its roughly 5,000-square-foot footprint, an open-concept layout on the second floor that a couple can arrange for either a ceremony or a reception without load-bearing walls breaking up the room. That single open space keeps a DJ, a dance floor, and dinner seating all within sight of each other.

Downstairs, the ground-floor marketplace runs another 5,000 square feet and holds more than 75 local vendors, with roughly 40 booths in the marketplace itself and the rest spread across the attached gallery, the upstairs artist studios, and the third-phase building added in 2002. Guests can wander through that marketplace before or after the event, which gives an evening at The Cotton Company a browsing element most event spaces do not offer.

Amenities

The Graham is wheelchair accessible, and parking is available on the south side of the building next to the Chamber of Commerce, which keeps the walk from car to venue short for guests less able to cover distance on foot. That same accessible ground-level access matters for load-in, since band or DJ equipment does not have to be carried up a narrow historic stairwell to reach the second-floor loft.

The exposed wooden beams and original brickwork throughout the building do a lot of the decorating work on their own, since a couple is renting a room that already has real texture rather than a blank box that needs to be dressed up. The building also sits inside the Downtown Wake Forest Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2002, among structures built between 1890 and 1949.

Location & Getting There

The Cotton Company sits in the middle of downtown Wake Forest’s historic district, within walking distance of the same shops and restaurants that fill the ground-floor marketplace, and close enough to other downtown venues that a rehearsal dinner nearby is an easy walk rather than a drive.

Up in The Graham, the exposed brick and open wood-beam ceiling create a livelier, more reflective sound than a carpeted modern hall, so a DJ setup on the second floor is working with a room that carries music well but also picks up more of the room’s natural echo than a fully finished space would.