NC History

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.

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…

“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.

It was bloody and never pretty. In the early days of the North Carolina colony, Native Americans inhabited the land and none were more powerful than the Tuscarora.

It was first known as a school for teachers until it became a college. Now, it is one of the state’s foremost universities.

It may be hard for us to fathom, but school has not always been public and free. In the state’s early days, if you wanted to educate your children, you sent them to private school, often far from home.

He’s often considered the world’s greatest showman. But when P.T. Barnum spent a November Saturday night in 1836 at Rocky Mount Falls (now Rocky Mount), he mesmerized a crowd not with circus acts but with a sermon.

North Carolina entered a new era in its effort to regulate alcoholic beverage sales when the state’s first Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) store opened in Wilson on July 2, 1935, where over 800 bottles of liquor were sold.