Begins at US 401, about two miles north of the Fuquay-Varina city limits.
Ends at South Saunders Street just outside downtown Raleigh.
Attractions: Runs alongside the dam that forms the road's namesake, Lake Wheeler along Swift Creek. Further north, goes past the historic Yates Mill and through instructional farmland owned by N.C. State University. North of I-40, Lake Wheeler provides access to the State Farmers' Market and forms the eastern boundary of the Dorothea Dix Hospital campus.
Major Intersections:
(south to north)
US 401 (south end), Ten Ten Road, Penny Road, Tryon Road, I-40 (exit 297), South Saunders Street (north end)
Notes:

Quite literally the back door into downtown Raleigh from the south, compared with the front door via South Saunders and McDowell streets, Lake Wheeler Road originally ended at today's intersection with Tryon Road near the settlement of Rhamkatte, a farming community southwest of Raleigh that dated to the 1840s before being swallowed up by the capital city in the 1950s.

North of today's Tryon Road crossroads, the road was named Rhamkatte Road after the nearby community. Rhamkatte Road continued west along Tryon Road as well, which explains why Lake Wheeler carries two state route numbers: it is SR 1009 north of Tryon Road, but SR 1371 to the south.

Except for the realignment at Tryon Road and a small realignment a few hundred feet to the west when I-40 was built in the early 1980s, Lake Wheeler Road has undergone no major changes in a history dating to the early 1900s. South of Tryon Road, Lake Wheeler runs through thousands of acres of farmland that N.C. State University owns and uses for agricultural education, perhaps the only area in the county where the Raleigh skyline is visible from a farm.

The Yates Mill, at the intersection of Lake Wheeler and Penny roads just south of the N.C. State farms, is a county park opened in 2006 that restored a historic 1750s grist mill, one of only a handful remaining in Wake County. The mill offers demonstrations on selected weekends throughout the year, and the land surrounding the millpond has been redeveloped into a park with hiking trails, picnic areas and an amphitheatre.

When the North Carolina state highway system was implemented in the 1920s, what is today the entire length of Lake Wheeler Road (including the Rhamkatte Road portion) was a loop to the west of N.C. 21, which used South Saunders Street to exit downtown Raleigh and continued south through Garner and into Fuquay. N.C. 21 later became U.S. 15A, which was rerouted in the 1940s to the east along South Wilmington Street. Since then, the north end of Lake Wheeler has been at an unnumbered portion of South Saunders Street, a few blocks north of where U.S. 70/401 and N.C. 50 depart South Saunders to run through downtown on McDowell and Dawson streets.

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