Chapter I
Where It All Began: The Moravians and the Founding of Salem
The story of Winston-Salem stretches back to a cold January day in 1753, when Moravian Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg trudged through the Carolina backcountry and chose a stretch of rolling land in the three forks of Muddy Creek as the site for a new settlement. He called the region "die Wachau" — Latinized as Wachovia — after the ancestral Zinzendorf estate in Austria. The Moravians, a Protestant fellowship rooted in 15th-century Bohemia, purchased nearly 99,000 acres from Lord John Carteret and set about building a community unlike anything else in colonial America.
The first settlers arrived on November 17, 1753, at a temporary village they named Bethabara. But Bethabara was never meant to be permanent. After years of careful planning, the Moravians founded Salem in 1766 — the word drawn from the Hebrew Shalom, meaning "peace." Salem was no ordinary frontier town. Its streets were laid out with Enlightenment precision: a broad central thoroughfare, narrower side lanes, a communal square, and purpose-built workshops for tinsmiths, blacksmiths, cobblers, potters, gunsmiths, and bakers. By the early 1800s, Salem's handcrafted goods were prized across the state, transported via the Great Wagon Road and the Western Plank Road to markets far and wide.
Did You Know? The Moravians believed in education for both boys and girls — a radical idea in the 18th century. In 1772, they opened a girls' boarding school that survives today as Salem Academy and College, the oldest continuously operating educational institution for women in the United States.
Among Salem's most cherished traditions is the Easter Sunrise Service held each year in God's Acre, the Moravian cemetery. That service has been conducted every Easter for more than 250 years without interruption — making it the oldest consecutively held Easter sunrise service in the nation. WSJS Radio has broadcast the service live since 1930, believed to be the longest continuously aired special broadcast in radio history.
Today, visitors can walk those same cobblestone paths at Old Salem Museums & Gardens, a living-history village where roughly 70 percent of the original buildings still stand. Skilled tradespeople demonstrate centuries-old crafts while the aroma of freshly baked Moravian cookies wafts from the Winkler Bakery, operating since 1800.
An important chapter in Salem's story involves the African Americans who were essential to the community's development from its earliest days. Enslaved people in Salem were often held by the Moravian Church itself rather than individual families. By the 1820s, the church began offering religious instruction, leading to the founding of St. Philips Moravian Church — the oldest standing African American church building in North Carolina. The Hidden Town Project continues to uncover and preserve these vital stories through archaeology and archival research.
Chapter II
The Rise of Winston and the Tobacco Empire
In 1849, the Salem congregation sold a parcel of land north of their settlement to the newly formed Forsyth County for use as a county seat. The new town went by "the county town" for two years before receiving a proper name in 1851: Winston, honoring Major Joseph Winston, a hero of the Revolutionary War battles at King's Mountain and Guilford Courthouse who later served as a state senator and U.S. congressman.
For its first two decades, Winston was a sleepy courthouse town. Everything changed in 1868, when business leaders in both Winston and Salem began pushing to connect their communities to the North Carolina Railroad. That same pivotal year, Thomas Jethro Brown of Davie County rented a former livery stable and established the first tobacco warehouse in Winston. Close behind him was Pleasant Henderson Hanes, also from Davie County, who built his first tobacco factory just feet from Brown's operation.
Then, in 1875, a 25-year-old Virginian named Richard Joshua Reynolds arrived from Patrick County, Virginia, with a hundred-and-some dollars and a determination to build something lasting. He constructed his first tobacco factory a few hundred feet from the Hanes operation. Within a decade, nearly 40 tobacco factories crowded the streets of Winston, and the town had become the undisputed tobacco capital of the South.
By 1920, Winston-Salem was the largest city in North Carolina — and the largest city between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta. With a population of 48,395, it had grown from a sleepy county seat to a booming industrial powerhouse in barely fifty years, fueled by the explosive success of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and the textile mills of the Hanes family.
The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company became the engine that drove everything. By the 1940s, Reynolds was one of the largest tobacco producers on earth. Its signature Camel brand, introduced in 1913, became a household name worldwide — and gave Winston-Salem the affectionate nickname it still carries: "Camel City." At the company's peak, more than 60 percent of the city's residents worked for either Reynolds or the Hanes textile mills. The wealth generated by these industries shaped the city's skyline, underwrote its schools and hospitals, built its mansions, and endowed its universities.
The Merger of 1913
Although Winston and Salem grew side by side — separated only by the centerline of a street — they remained stubbornly independent for decades. An 1879 attempt at unification failed when Winston's citizens rejected the proposed use of "Salem" alone as the combined name. But by the early 1900s, the two towns shared a post office (renamed "Winston-Salem" in 1899), shared commerce, and shared an identity. On May 13, 1913, voters approved a second referendum, and the Twin City was officially born. It was a unique consolidation in North Carolina history — virtually every other county in the state had grown around a single municipality. Forsyth County had always had two.
Chapter III
The Reynolds Building: Father of the Empire State
If you have ever gazed up at the Empire State Building in New York City and felt a shiver of recognition, there is a reason. Its father stands 500 miles to the south, at the corner of Fourth and Main Streets in downtown Winston-Salem.
In the late 1920s, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company president Bowman Gray Sr. commissioned New York architects R.H. Shreve and William F. Lamb to design a corporate headquarters that would be unlike anything the South had ever seen. The result was the Reynolds Building, a 314-foot Art Deco tower of Indiana limestone that opened on April 23, 1929. With 21 floors above ground and three basement levels, it instantly became the tallest building south of Baltimore and won the National Architectural Association's Building of the Year award.
The building was far more than an office tower. Its lower floors hummed with a barber shop, restaurant, pharmacy, telegraph office, and a railway ticket counter — a city within a city. Its eight-by-eight bay ziggurat tower, with dramatic setbacks at the 17th, 19th, and 21st floors, its lobby clad in St. Genevieve golden-vein marble, and its polished brass elevator doors gave Winston-Salem a piece of Manhattan glamour.
The Father's Day Card Legend: One of the most beloved pieces of Winston-Salem lore holds that the Empire State Building sends a Father's Day card to the Reynolds Building each year. The truth is slightly different but no less charming. In 1979, on the Reynolds Building's 50th anniversary, Empire State Building General Manager Robert L. Timber sent a congratulatory card acknowledging the Winston-Salem skyscraper as the architectural model for New York's most famous landmark. That card hung in the Reynolds Building lobby for years and gave birth to the enduring legend.
In 2014, the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A $60 million renovation transformed the upper floors into luxury residences, while the lower levels became the Kimpton Cardinal Hotel, complete with Katharine Brasserie & Bar — named for R.J. Reynolds' visionary wife, Katharine Smith Reynolds. The "Grand Old Lady" of downtown Winston-Salem stands as proudly today as she did in 1929.
Chapter IV
The Companies That Changed America
Few cities of its size have launched more nationally — and globally — significant companies than Winston-Salem. Here are the enterprises, and the people behind them, that made the Twin City famous.
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (1875)
Richard Joshua Reynolds arrived from Virginia in 1875 with modest capital and outsized ambition. His first product was chewing tobacco. His company grew so quickly that by 1913 it could launch Camel, the first nationally marketed cigarette, from its Winston factories. Camels became so ubiquitous that the brand name became synonymous with the city itself. At its height, R.J. Reynolds was one of the largest corporations in the world. Although tobacco's role has diminished, the company's legacy is etched into every corner of the city — in its buildings, its streets, its institutions, and in the Innovation Quarter, where former tobacco warehouses now house biotech startups and medical research labs.
Wachovia Bank (1879 & 1893)
The name Wachovia traces directly back to the Moravians' original name for the land they settled. Wachovia National Bank was founded in 1879 by James Alexander Gray — father of Bowman Gray Sr. — and William Lemly. In 1893, a companion institution called Wachovia Loan and Trust was formed. The two merged in 1911 to create Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, which grew into one of the largest financial institutions in the Southeast. First Union acquired Wachovia in 2001 and adopted the Wachovia name. Wells Fargo purchased Wachovia in 2009 during the financial crisis, and the Wachovia name was retired in 2011 — but its roots remain firmly planted in Winston-Salem soil.
Hanes: Two Brothers, Two Empires (1900–1901)
The Hanes family gave America its underwear — and much of its hosiery. In 1900, J. Wesley Hanes founded Shamrock Hosiery Mills to manufacture men's socks. The following year, his brother Pleasant Henderson Hanes — who had earlier left the tobacco business — started the P.H. Hanes Knitting Company, making men's underwear. The two firms eventually merged to become Hanesbrands, today a Fortune 500 company with brands recognized in every American household. At the company's peak in Winston-Salem, Hanes and Reynolds together employed the vast majority of the local workforce.
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts (1937)
On July 13, 1937, a young Kentuckian named Vernon Rudolph arrived in Winston-Salem with two friends, a 1936 Pontiac, and about $25 in his pocket. Legend has it he chose Winston-Salem after pulling out a pack of Camel cigarettes and reasoning that any city supporting a nationally known brand had to be a good bet. Rudolph rented a building across from Salem Academy on South Main Street in Old Salem and began making yeast-raised doughnuts from a secret recipe his uncle had purchased from a New Orleans French chef in 1933.
At first, Rudolph sold only to local grocery stores. But when the irresistible smell of frying dough drew pedestrians to his door, he cut a hole in the wall and began selling hot doughnuts directly to the public. That hole-in-the-wall moment launched Krispy Kreme into the American consciousness. Today, the company operates in more than 35 countries. The secret recipe remains locked in a safe. And in 1997, Krispy Kreme artifacts were donated to the Smithsonian Institution — a fitting honor for a brand born on a Winston-Salem sidewalk. A commemorative plaque at the corner of South Main and West Academy streets marks where the original store once stood.
Texas Pete Hot Sauce (1929)
At the onset of the Great Depression, the Garner family of Winston-Salem was struggling to make ends meet. Young Thad Garner had used his college savings to buy a barbecue restaurant called the Dixie Pig. The restaurant failed, but the family's hot sauce survived — and thrived. Looking for an American name with a kick, Sam Garner combined the spicy associations of Texas with the nickname of his son Harold — "Pete" — and Texas Pete was born. The T.W. Garner Food Company, formed in 1946 by Sam and sons Thad, Ralph, and Harold, still operates from its original Winston-Salem factory site on Indiana Avenue, built in 1942 on the land where the Garner family farmhouse once stood. The sauce is carried aboard every operating U.S. Navy vessel.
Piedmont Airlines (1948)
On a rainy February 20, 1948, a lone Douglas DC-3 sat on the tarmac at Smith Reynolds Airport in Winston-Salem with a single paying passenger: the airline's own founder, Thomas Henry Davis. That flight — from Wilmington to Cincinnati with stops along the way — was the humble beginning of Piedmont Airlines, which would grow from the smallest of 17 regional carriers into the sixth-largest airline in the United States. Named Air Transport World's "Airline of the Year" in 1984, Piedmont eventually flew 200 jet aircraft coast-to-coast and even crossed the Atlantic to London. The airline merged with USAir in 1989, but the Piedmont Aviation Historical Society keeps its proud legacy alive in Winston-Salem to this day.
And So Many More
Winston-Salem's entrepreneurial spirit didn't stop there. The city also gave rise to Lowes Foods, the Flow Automotive Companies, Bennett's Cola (brewed here in 1906), and numerous other enterprises. In 1949, the city established the Arts Council of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County — the first arts council in the United States — cementing its identity as a cultural as well as industrial powerhouse.
Chapter V
Wings Over Winston: Smith Reynolds Airport and the Age of Flight
Winston-Salem's love affair with aviation began in June 1919, when two Army officers from Camp Bragg landed a Curtiss biplane on an alfalfa field on the city's east side. Few Winston-Salem residents had ever seen an airplane. That brief visit prompted local leaders to purchase land along Old Kernsville Road and build Maynard Field — one of the earliest municipal airfields in the Carolinas.
The airport was renamed Smith Reynolds Airport in honor of Zachary Smith Reynolds, the youngest child of R.J. and Katharine Reynolds, who was a passionate aviator before his mysterious death at age 20 in 1932 at the family's Reynolda House estate. When it opened its expanded terminal, the airport was hailed as one of the finest in the country.
During World War II, Smith Reynolds Airport became a critical military installation. The U.S. Army Air Corps trained B-25 bomber pilots, installed a weather bureau and control tower, extended the runways, and established the Office of Flying Safety's national headquarters in downtown Winston-Salem and at the airport, staffed by 600 military personnel. That wartime infrastructure laid the groundwork for the postwar aviation boom.
Tom Davis, who had been taking flying lessons at the airport since he was 15, turned Piedmont Aviation into Piedmont Airlines right there on that field. For decades, Smith Reynolds served as Piedmont's home base, launching flights that would eventually connect small Southern towns to the entire nation. Today, the airport — identified by its code INT — continues to serve general aviation, corporate aircraft, and charter flights, while the region's commercial air traffic operates through nearby Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro.
Chapter VI
Minds and Medicine: Wake Forest, Bowman Gray, and the City of Learning
Wake Forest University
Founded in 1834 by the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina, Wake Forest College spent its first 122 years in the small town of Wake Forest, north of Raleigh. In 1946, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation — named for the aviator whose legacy is woven throughout this story — offered the college a transformative gift to relocate 100 miles west to Winston-Salem. Charles and Mary Reynolds Babcock (R.J. Reynolds' daughter) donated approximately 330 acres of the Reynolda estate as the new campus site. Construction began in 1952. In the summer of 1956, Wake Forest University opened on its new Winston-Salem campus in the graceful Georgian buildings that still define it today. The institution was elevated to university status in 1967 and has since become one of the most respected private research universities in the South.
Bowman Gray School of Medicine
The medical school actually arrived before the rest of the university. Wake Forest College had operated a two-year medical program since 1902. When the Bowman Gray Foundation — endowed from Bowman Gray Sr.'s fortune after his death in 1935 — offered $750,000 to any two-year medical school willing to relocate to Winston-Salem and expand to four years, Dean Coy C. Carpenter seized the opportunity. The Bowman Gray School of Medicine opened on September 10, 1941, on the campus of North Carolina Baptist Hospital with 75 students. It was the medical school's relocation that first demonstrated Winston-Salem could attract elite academic institutions — and it paved the way for the rest of Wake Forest to follow 15 years later.
Today, the Wake Forest School of Medicine ranks among the top 50 in the nation for research, anchors the vast Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist medical complex, and drives the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter — a 200-acre mixed-use campus in downtown Winston-Salem where regenerative medicine researchers and biotech engineers work in repurposed tobacco warehouses. The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) has earned international renown for its work engineering replacement tissues and organs.
A City of Colleges
Winston-Salem's educational landscape extends far beyond Wake Forest. Winston-Salem State University, a historically Black university, was founded in 1892 and has educated generations of leaders. The University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), established in 1963 as the first public arts conservatory in the United States, has trained some of the nation's finest dancers, filmmakers, musicians, and actors. And Salem College, rooted in that 1772 Moravian girls' school, continues its mission as the oldest educational institution for women in continuous operation in the country.
Chapter VII
Grand Estates, Great Parks, and the Treasures of the Twin City
Reynolda House Museum of American Art
In 1917, tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds and his wife Katharine Smith Reynolds completed their country estate on the outskirts of Winston-Salem. Katharine was far more than a socialite — she was a progressive reformer who championed improved working conditions in her husband's factories and pioneered the estate's model farm, which included a school, a post office, and workers' cottages designed to promote self-sufficiency. After R.J. Reynolds' death in 1918 and Katharine's passing in 1924, the estate's destiny shifted. Today, Reynolda House Museum of American Art displays an outstanding collection of American paintings, prints, and sculpture spanning from 1755 to the present, all within the family's original bungalow-style home. The surrounding Reynolda Gardens — 134 acres of formal gardens, woodlands, and wetlands — are open year-round and free to the public. Nearby Reynolda Village fills the estate's original farm buildings with shops, restaurants, and galleries.
Graylyn Estate
Across the road from Reynolda stands one of the most magnificent private homes ever built in North Carolina. In 1925, Bowman Gray Sr. — president and later chairman of R.J. Reynolds — and his wife Nathalie Lyons Gray purchased 87 acres of former Reynolda pastureland and began building their dream home. Completed in 1932, the Norman Revival-style Graylyn Estate featured nearly 60 rooms and 46,000 square feet of living space, making it the second-largest residence in North Carolina after the Biltmore Estate. The interiors reflect the Grays' world travels: Egyptian tapestries, ornate French paneling, and a set of intricately carved wooden panels from Damascus believed to be among the oldest in the world.
After Bowman Gray's death in 1935, the family donated Graylyn to the Bowman Gray School of Medicine, where it served as a psychiatric hospital from 1947 to 1959. In 1972, son Gordon Gray purchased it back and donated it to Wake Forest University. It served as a dormitory in the 1970s before a dramatic fire in 1980 during a Winston-Salem Symphony performance on the lawn. The estate was painstakingly restored and reopened in 1984 as a conference center and boutique hotel — named one of the top boutique hotels in the nation by USA Today. Visitors can still enjoy Mrs. Gray's butterscotch cookies every afternoon, served in honor of the family's dogs, Butter and Scotch.
Tanglewood Park
The story of Tanglewood Park reaches back to 1757, when Welsh immigrant William Johnson purchased land along the Yadkin River. In 1859, his descendant James Johnson built the 18-room Manor House that still stands at the heart of the estate. In 1921, William Neal Reynolds — R.J. Reynolds' younger brother, known as "Mr. Will" — purchased the property, enlarged it to over 1,100 acres, and transformed it into a showplace for his beloved Standardbred harness horses. His wife Kate poured her passion into the estate's gardens, employing German master gardener Frank Lustig, who tended Tanglewood's plantings for 60 years.
The Reynolds couple had no children and, in 1951, willed the property to the citizens of Forsyth County as a public park. Today, Tanglewood spans 1,200 acres and offers two championship golf courses — including the Championship Course designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., which hosted the 1974 PGA Championship won by Lee Trevino — plus horse stables, swimming, fishing, camping, an arboretum and rose garden, and the beloved Tanglewood Festival of Lights, a holiday tradition since 1992 that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each winter.
SciWorks
For decades, Winston-Salem maintained two beloved institutions: the Children's Museum of Winston-Salem and SciWorks, the science center and planetarium. In 2024, those two legacies merged into a single spectacular facility: the new SciWorks, a four-story downtown museum featuring interactive exhibits, a rooftop playground, and an updated planetarium. It represents a new chapter in the city's long commitment to science education and hands-on learning for all ages.
Chapter VIII
On the Air: Radio and Television in the Twin City
WSJS — The Voice of Winston-Salem (1930)
On April 17, 1930 — Holy Thursday — WSJS signed on at 600 AM, its call letters standing for the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel newspapers that owned it. Three days later, the station broadcast the Easter Sunrise Service from God's Acre — a tradition it has maintained every year since, making it the longest continuously aired special broadcast in American radio. Originally housed in the newspaper's downtown newsroom with its antenna strung between two rooftop towers, WSJS grew into the region's most influential radio voice. The station served as a CBS affiliate from 1933 before switching to NBC in 1940. The legendary Wally Williams hosted "Carolina in the Morning" from 1954 to 1979, and Glenn Scott carried the tradition for nearly 30 more years after that.
WTOB — Winston-Salem's Good Guys
Beginning in 1947, WTOB became the soundtrack of a generation. A powerhouse Top 40 station at 1380 AM through the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, WTOB was the number-one rated station in Winston-Salem for years. Its DJs — known as "The Good Guys" — included legends like Dick Bennick (The Flying Dutchman), George Lee, John Stanton, and a young Rick Dees, who would go on to national fame. WTOB even briefly operated a television station: WTOB-TV (Channel 26) launched on September 26, 1953, as an ABC and DuMont affiliate, but the UHF station struggled to compete and signed off in 1957. The WTOB radio brand has been revived multiple times, and the station currently broadcasts at 980 AM and 96.7 FM, carrying on its classic hits legacy.
WSJS-TV / WXII-TV — Channel 12 (1953)
Four days after WTOB-TV went on the air, WSJS-TV Channel 12 launched on September 30, 1953, with coverage of the World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers. An NBC affiliate from day one, the station was a partnership between Piedmont Publishing and Hollywood actress Mary Pickford. Gordon Gray — son of Bowman and Nathalie Gray — ran the station as part of Triangle Broadcasting until FCC ownership rules forced its sale to Multimedia, Inc. in 1972. On October 2 of that year, the station was renamed WXII-TV — the Roman numeral XII a clever nod to Channel 12. Today, owned by Hearst Television, WXII 12 News remains one of the Piedmont Triad's most-watched news operations.
WFDD — Born in a Boarding House (1946)
Perhaps no station in North Carolina has a more charming origin story. In the fall of 1946, two Wake Forest College students — Alva "Al" Parris and Henry "Randy" Randall — began broadcasting illegally from their rooming house on the old Wake Forest campus. Their five-watt signal barely reached the girls' dormitory 300 feet away. But the broadcasts proved so popular that the college threw its support behind an official station. Students raised $200, brothers David and Ralph Herring built a 50-watt transmitter from an electronics book, and on April 19, 1948, the station signed on as WAKE. When those call letters turned out to be taken, the name changed to WFDD — Wake Forest Demon Deacons.
WFDD moved with the university to Winston-Salem in 1956 and became a non-commercial educational station in 1961. In 1971, it became a charter member of National Public Radio — the first NPR affiliate in North Carolina and among the first in the nation. Today, 88.5 WFDD broadcasts to 32 counties in North Carolina and Virginia, serving as the region's most trusted source of public radio news and programming.
Chapter IX
Where Winston-Salem Shops: From Thruway to Hanes Mall
Thruway Center (1955)
When President Eisenhower championed the interstate highway system in the early 1950s, three Winston-Salem entrepreneurs — Ray Messick (of Food Fair supermarkets), Earl Slick, and W.B. Leverton — saw the future. They purchased a 14-acre dairy farm on Stratford Road near the route of a planned expressway and built what would become Winston-Salem's first shopping center. Thruway Center opened on October 13, 1955, with 15 stores and parking for 1,200 cars — a revolutionary concept for a city where downtown Trade Street had always been the center of commerce. WTOB Radio even broadcast from the center for years. Dewey's Bakery, an original 1955 tenant, still serves its legendary Moravian cookies and sugar cakes from the same shopping center more than seven decades later — Thruway's last surviving charter merchant.
Hanes Mall (1975)
Hanes Mall, which opened in 1975, remains one of the largest enclosed shopping malls in North Carolina. Situated along the burgeoning Stratford Road and Hanes Mall Boulevard corridor, it anchors a sprawling commercial district that transformed the southwestern quadrant of Winston-Salem into the city's retail epicenter. The mall's name, of course, pays homage to the textile dynasty whose factories once employed thousands in the same city.
Chapter X
The Future of the Twin City: Innovation, Arts, and Reinvention
Winston-Salem has always reinvented itself. The Moravians built a precision-crafted community in the wilderness. The tobacco barons raised skyscrapers and launched airlines. The educators and doctors built world-class institutions. Today, a new generation is writing the next chapter.
Innovation Quarter: Tobacco Warehouses to Biotech Labs
The most dramatic symbol of Winston-Salem's transformation is the Wake Forest Innovation Quarter. Stretching across 200 acres of downtown, this mixed-use district occupies the former R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company manufacturing campus. Where workers once rolled cigarettes, scientists now engineer replacement human organs at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The Bowman Gray Center for Medical Education occupies a converted Reynolds plant. Tech startups, biotech firms, and arts organizations share space with restaurants and apartments in an urban campus that is redefining what a Southern downtown can be.
City of Arts and Innovation
Winston-Salem earned its official nickname — "City of Arts and Innovation" — honestly. The 1949 founding of the nation's first arts council, the 1963 creation of the country's first public arts conservatory (UNCSA), and a thriving creative scene that includes the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), the Sawtooth School for Visual Art, galleries in the downtown Arts District, and annual festivals like RiverRun International Film Festival all contribute to a cultural density that rivals cities many times its size.
A Community Looking Forward
In 2024, Winston-Salem saw the opening of the new SciWorks facility downtown, a physical investment in science education for the next generation. The City of Winston-Salem continues to invest in revitalizing neighborhoods, expanding greenways, supporting small businesses, and attracting new industries. Nearby, Boom Supersonic selected Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro as the site for its first full-scale manufacturing facility — bringing supersonic aviation back to the region where Piedmont Airlines once dreamed of connecting small-town North Carolina to the world.
The Visit Winston-Salem convention and visitors bureau promotes the city as one of the best places in the Southeast to live, visit, and retire. With a lower cost of living than larger metros, a walkable downtown, proximity to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and a cultural heritage as deep as any city in the South, Winston-Salem is poised for its next great era.
Winston-Salem by the Numbers: The city is the fifth-largest in North Carolina and the second-largest in the Piedmont Triad. Wake Forest University, Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, and the Innovation Quarter together form one of the state's most significant concentrations of research, medicine, and higher education. The region is home to more than 675,000 people in the Piedmont Triad metro area.
Essential Winston-Salem Resources
Whether you are planning a visit, considering a move, or simply want to learn more, these links offer a gateway into everything the Twin City has to offer:
Visit Winston-Salem | City of Winston-Salem | Old Salem Museums & Gardens | Reynolda House | Graylyn Estate | Wake Forest University | Wake Forest School of Medicine | Winston-Salem State University | UNC School of the Arts | Innovation Quarter | Tanglewood Park | SciWorks | 88.5 WFDD Public Radio | WXII 12 News | Thruway Center | Hanes Mall | Piedmont Aviation Historical Society | Digital Forsyth | NCpedia: Winston-Salem | WinstonSalemVoIP.com