## Winston-Salem
Winston-Salem sits in North Carolina's northwest Piedmont, where the land drains into the Yadkin–Pee Dee River Basin. Less than 30 miles north, the ancient Sauratown Mountains rise, named for the Saura people who once inhabited this ground. This is a crossroads, a place where people paused and then put down roots, building towns that eventually fused into one.
The story begins in 1753 when Moravian Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg chose a site in the Muddy Creek forks. He named it "die Wachau," Latin for Wachovia, after the ancestral lands of their patron, Count Zinzendorf. The Moravians purchased nearly 99,000 acres from John Carteret, 2nd Earl Granville. The first settlers arrived that November, establishing Bethabara. By 1766, a new town, Salem—meaning "Peace" in Hebrew, chosen by Count Zinzendorf—was under construction. Salem was a Moravian settlement, congregation-owned, with public buildings surrounding Salem Square. For years, only church members could live there, a practice that ended by the Civil War.
Just north, a different settlement took shape. In 1849, the Salem Congregation sold land to the newly formed Forsyth County for its county seat. Named Winston in 1851 for Revolutionary War hero Joseph Winston, it started slow. But by 1868, business leaders from both towns worked to connect Winston to the North Carolina Railroad. The 1880s brought tobacco factories, with Pleasant Hanes and R.J. Reynolds establishing operations. Hanes would go on to found Shamrock Knitting Mills in 1900. By 1899, the U.S. Post Office began referring to the two as Winston-Salem. After a referendum, the towns officially incorporated as "Winston-Salem" in 1913.
The Reynolds family and their tobacco company shaped the merged city. By the 1940s, 60% of workers were employed by Reynolds or Hanes textile factories. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company's demand for French cigarette paper and Turkish tobacco was so vast that Winston-Salem, 200 miles inland, became an official U.S. port of entry. In 1916, it ranked as the nation’s eighth-largest port. The company built 180 homes in 1917, selling them at cost to workers, creating "Reynoldstown." By 1920, with 48,395 residents, Winston-Salem was North Carolina’s largest city. The 1929 Reynolds Building, headquarters of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, stood as the tallest structure south of Baltimore, a prototype for the Empire State Building. Institutions like Salem College, founded in 1772, and Winston-Salem State University, established in 1892 as Slater Industrial Academy, took root. Wake Forest College moved here in 1956, becoming Wake Forest University.
These forces created a city of dual heritage — Moravian communal living and industrial tobacco might — that has never stopped remaking itself. It built the first arts council in the United States, a legacy that still draws artists and innovators here.