Qualla: Piedmont Triad

Piedmont Triad: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three cities, none of them quite big enough to dominate, sit in a rough triangle across the north-central Piedmont of North Carolina: Greensboro with about 299,000 people, Winston-Salem with 250,000, and High Point with 114,000. The Census Bureau spent decades trying to figure out whether this was one metro area or three or five. In 2003 it split the old Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point MSA into three metros and two micropolitans. The people who lived there kept calling it the Triad anyway. The combined statistical area now holds about 1.6 million people, making it the 33rd-largest CSA in the United States and the second-largest urbanized region of North Carolina after Charlotte.

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Piedmont Triad: Where Four Interstates Meet

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Geography did most of the work. Three interstates - I-40 east-west, I-85 southwest-northeast, and the newer I-73 and I-74 north-south - all converge through the Triad, making it one of the great freight crossroads of the southeast. Piedmont Triad International Airport sits in the...

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Piedmont Triad: Textiles, Tobacco, Furniture

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Triad's industrial trinity built it and partly hollowed it out. Hanes (now HanesBrands) makes underwear in Winston-Salem and has since 1901. Reynolds American, owner of Camel and Newport cigarettes, is headquartered there. Wrangler, Kontoor Brands, and VF Corporation - the la...

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Piedmont Triad: Where Civil Rights History Lives

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Triad's civil rights record is among the heaviest in the South. The Greensboro sit-ins began on February 1, 1960, when four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at a Woolworth lunch counter and refused to leave. The protests spread national...

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Piedmont Triad: Education in Layers

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

More than twenty colleges and universities operate in the Triad. Wake Forest University (private research) in Winston-Salem. UNC Greensboro (public research, 20,000 students). North Carolina A&T State University, the largest historically Black university in the country. The Unive...

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Piedmont Triad: A Different Kind of Triangle

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Visitors confuse the Triad with the Research Triangle to the east, around Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. They are different in style. The Triad is older, more industrial, more racially mixed, and more visibly bruised by the deindustrialization that swept the textile and tobacc...

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