History

On Aug.21, 1965, Rev.Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1879, Thomas Edison tasked geologist William Earl Hidden with finding platinum in North Carolina to help extend the life of his light bulb.

In the 1930s, a local distributor of Shell Oil created a new way for its brand to stand out as the top choice for car owners to fuel up.

Known as the first child born in the New World, Virginia Dare may not have disappeared with her Roanoke kinsmen in 1590.

In addition to the tallest mountain and tallest sand dune system on the East Coast, North Carolina is also home to the oldest trees in eastern North America.

Born in 1926, Andy Griffith, hails from the tiny mountain town of Mount Airy, North Carolina, which pays tribute to him and his famous show.

L.D.Peeler began his career investing in Kentucky-based Mint-Bottle Soda Company.

Roanoke Island in Dare County, North Carolina is home to the oldest grapevine in the United States – the muscadine.

Edward Teach, better known as the pirate Blackbeard, terrorized the Atlantic in the early 18th century.

A barren circle 40 feet in diameter lies in the pine woods of Chatham County, just south of Silver City.

Known as “Grey Eagle” to the Cherokee and Catawba peoples, Black Mountain was founded in 1893 as an artist colony.

Fishing in a creek in 1799, 12-year-old Conrad Reed found a 17-pound gold nugget on his family’s farm in Cabarrus County, North Carolina.

Brown Mountain Lights are a spectacle of mysterious lights that have been spotted moving through valleys in Pisgah National Forest for generations.

One day in 1960, Wilber Hardee visited the state’s first McDonald’s in 1960, sat in his parked car most of the day, and watched.

Michel Ney was a French military commander and the right-hand man of Napoleon, who dubbed him “the bravest of the brave.

On Feb. 1, 1960, four Black North Carolina A&T freshmen sat at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro and ordered coffee.

December marks 65 years for McAdenville as “Christmas Town USA,” with over 375 trees and most homes decorated in red, white and green lights.

In the 1920s, a woman in a pink gown fell from the indoor balcony outside room 545 of Grove Park Inn. 100 years later, she’s still there.

Reynolda Gardens – a 125-acre botanical masterpiece adjacent to Wake Forest University ­– is complete with working greenhouses, woodland trails and wildlife habitats.

Declared a National Natural Landmark in 1974, the dunes were dangerously close to urban development until a local resident planted herself in front of the oncoming bulldozers.

By the mid-1920s, Piggly Wiggly was the nation’s third largest grocery chain, with stores in Asheville, Charlotte, Raleigh and Wilmington.

Just across from downtown Wilmington on the Cape Fear River, you’ll find the USS North Carolina.

With Franklin’s annual Taste of Scotland Festival and Braveheart 5K quashed by stay-at-home orders, we must temporarily revamp all celebratory measures.

Imagine yourself lounging on a patio, a chilled glass of Pacheca Branco Grande Reserve in your hand, overlooking the vineyards of a lush 18th-century estate and vineyard in the Douro Valley in Portugal.

North Carolina’s first town and port, Bath, was hardly a place to take children.

In the late 1880s, charmed by Asheville’s beauty, railroad scion George Washington Vanderbilt II decided to build a “little mountain…

The first blues song I heard growing up on Atlanta college radio was “Cross Road Blues,” 1936, by genre progenitor Robert Johnson.

Before 1895, Dockery Plantation was, like much of the Delta at the time, a swampy tangle of gum and cypress trees, panthers, wolves and mosquitoes.

The U.S. Civil Rights Trail stops in 15 states, few as chilling as Mississippi.

“My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life,” wrote Wilbur Wright in 1900, referring to his irrational obsession with powered flight.