North Carolina

C

Museums

The North Carolina Museum of Art, in Raleigh, is the nation’s first art museum whose collection was founded with state funds. At Hickory is an art museum with American and European works and Chinese porcelains. Other art collections are in Chapel Hill, Greensboro, Durham, and Winston-Salem. Raleigh and Charlotte have natural history museums, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a planetarium. The state also has many small museums devoted to special displays, such as minerals, handicrafts, Native American lore, and the material of local historical societies.

D

Communications

The first newspaper in the state was founded in 1751 at New Bern. By 1900 there were 27 dailies, but their circulation was very small. In 2002 there were 47 dailies, of which the largest and best-known were the Charlotte Observer, the Raleigh News & Observer, the News & Record of Greensboro, and the Winston-Salem Journal.

The state’s first radio station was WBT, founded in Charlotte in 1921. In 2002 there were 146 AM and 112 FM radio stations and 39 television stations.

E

Music and Theater

North Carolina strongly supports country music and old-style American folk dancing. Such events as the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, the North Carolina Folk Heritage Awards, and a variety of fiddler’s conventions are typical ingredients of this cultural heritage. Classical music is performed by the North Carolina Symphony, which is based in Raleigh, and by several other city symphony orchestras. The American Dance Festival has its headquarters at Duke University. Brevard, a Blue Ridge resort, is the site of the Brevard Music Center and Festival. It presents a series that begins in June with the opening of its music camp and runs through August.

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Several outdoor historical dramas take place each summer. One of the most popular, Unto These Hills, portrays the events leading up to the removal of the Cherokee people from North Carolina to Oklahoma. It is performed at Cherokee in the Great Smoky Mountains. At Fort Raleigh National Historic Site near Manteo, The Lost Colony describes the disappearance of the first attempted English settlement in the state. A saga of Daniel Boone, Horn in the West, is performed at Boone. Plays and musical comedies are presented in the state’s summer theater circuit. Flat Rock Playhouse is the state theater. Year-round amateur drama is presented at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at theaters in the chief cities.

VI

Recreation and Places to Visit

Perhaps the best-known scenic attraction is Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is located astride the North Carolina-Tennessee border. The park’s mountainous terrain and primitive wilderness afford ideal conditions for hiking, fishing, and camping. Western North Carolina’s spectacular mountain panoramas and quiet beauty are accessible from the Blue Ridge Parkway, a scenic highway running from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains. Along the route are beautiful displays of rhododendrons, mountain laurels, and rugged terrain, including Mount Mitchell (2,037 m/6,684 ft), the highest peak in the eastern United States.

A

Other National Areas

A major attraction of the coastal region is the Outer Banks, much of which has been set aside as the Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout national seashores. The area offers extensive opportunities for seaside recreation. Deep-sea fishing off the Outer Banks is excellent. Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, near the cape, is the tallest lighthouse in North America at 63 m (208 ft). The national seashore also contains one of the state’s three national wildlife refuges—Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge. Also located at Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks is the Wright Brothers National Memorial, the place where the first motor-powered flight was made in 1903. Fort Raleigh National Historic Site on Roanoke Island commemorates the place where the English first attempted to establish a colony in America. Moores Creek National Battlefield and Guilford Courthouse National Military Park are sites of important battles of the American Revolution (1775-1783). The home of the poet Carl Sandburg, Connemara, at Flat Rock, is a national historic site.

Pisgah, Nantahala, Uwharrie, and Croatan national forests cover 486,000 hectares (1.2 million acres). Pisgah National Forest lies in the mountains, as does Nantahala National Forest. Because the sun penetrates to the bottom of Nantahala Gorge only in the middle of the day, the Cherokee called it the “Land of the Noon Day Sun,” or “Nantahala.” About 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) of virgin wilderness forest in the Nantahala National Forest has been set aside as the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, to memorialize the poet who wrote the poem “Trees.” The Uwharrie National Forest, in the central Piedmont region of the state, is a fairly rugged area of ancient volcanic mountains that have resisted erosion and weathering better than the surrounding countryside. The forest received its name from German settlers, for whom uwharrie meant “new home.” On the coast is the Croatan National Forest, which derived its name from the name of a main town of the Algonquin people that occupied the region when the English arrived in the 1580s.

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