Qualla: Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States, CC0. Two towns, hyphenated. Salem was a Moravian congregational settlement founded in 1766 - die Wachau, Latinized to Wachovia, named for the Danube valley estate of Count Zinzendorf. Winston was its rough neighbor to the north, founded in 1849 as a Forsyth County seat and renamed in 1852 for the Revolutionary War officer Joseph Winston. The Moravians built churches and choirs and laid their dead in God's Acre under flat stones. The Winstonians built tobacco factories. In 1875 a trader named R.J. Reynolds opened a chewing-tobacco plant in Winston. By the 1880s the post office was already writing both names on its mail. In 1913, after a referendum, the two towns officially became Winston-Salem - the Camel City, the Twin City, the place where Moravian piety and tobacco money learned to share a hyphen.

Image: Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States | CC0

Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Camel City

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States, CC0. By the 1940s, sixty percent of Winston-Salem worked either for R.J. Reynolds or for the Hanes textile mills. Reynolds imported so much Turkish tobacco and French cigarette paper for Camel cigarettes that the federal government designated the city an official port of entry - 200 m...

Image: Warren LeMay from Cullowhee, NC, United States | CC0

Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Mary Ellen and the Whole Town

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0. Steve Earle wrote a song called Mary Ellen and Rick about a Winston-Salem couple - Earle has lived a lot of places, and Winston-Salem sticks with people. Other artists have left their marks too. R.E.M. recorded Chronic Town here in 1981 at Mitch Easter's Drive-In Studio in his pa...

Image: DiscoA340 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Old Salem Still Standing

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Bjorgen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk south from downtown and the present runs out. The brick streets and dormered houses of Old Salem look the way Salem looked in the 1770s because seventy percent of the buildings are original. The cobbled square is still Salem Square. The Single Brothers House still stands. Go...

Image: David Bjorgen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Innovation Quarter

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lesgura, representing Wake Forest Baptist Health Photography, CC BY-SA 3.0. The east end of downtown used to be Reynolds tobacco-processing plants. Now it is the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter, anchored by 1.9 million square feet of biotech labs, university offices, and apartments built in old factory shells. Ninety companies. 3,600 workers. 1,800 studen...

Image: Lesgura, representing Wake Forest Baptist Health Photography | CC BY-SA 3.0