History

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.

During the Great Depression, a young entrepreneur named Vernon Rudolph purchased a unique recipe for fluffy doughnuts. In 1937, he opened shop in Winston-Salem, and the Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporation was born.

In 1932, a composer and WWI veteran named Lamar Stringfield united a gaggle of musicians to form the North Carolina Symphony. By 1935, they’d performed over 140 concerts all over the state.

From 1720 to 1870, North Carolina led the world in the production of tar, pitch and turpentine – products used to paint and seal wooden ships. From there, historians debate how the term “Tar Heel” originated.

In 1587, after a failed first attempt, the English again tried to colonize Roanoke Island. Received peacefully by the Croatoan tribe, the English established a healthy settlement.

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.” Carl Sandburg, one of America’s best-known, best-loved poets and writers wrote that back in 1922.

Stephen, a slave on the 1839 plantation of Abisha Slade in Caswell County, was tired from a long day of work. It was no surprise then that he nodded off from the heat of the fire he was watching to cure the tobacco.

To conduct the business affairs of a state – or a colony in earlier times – requires a place for leaders to meet. Of course, it has not always been Raleigh.