The perfect recipe for a place throws in a hint of the old and a dash of the new. Heading away from Asheville and destined for the coast, I picked a point in the middle of North Carolina to spend the night. Winston-Salem, a ying and yang sort of two-part town sits in central North Carolina. Beginning with the Winston piece of this puzzle, I roamed a modern town, full of bars, restaurants and life. Winston boomed in the 19th and 20th centuries as an industrial trading hub. Tobacco and textiles were the names of the game around here, as you can still see today in Winston’s more industrial neck Continue Reading
Beaufort, North Carolina Wishes You Were Here
I met a married couple in Beaufort. Sarah Gibbs was married to a man by the name of Jacob Shepard. The couple told me in the chatter of morning wind how Jacob’s ship went out to sea, never to return, or so it would seem. In the meantime, Sarah moved on, accepting that her husband would never return. She remarried and had a child with Nathaniel Gibbs, a man I did not meet. However, the plot thickens. Becoming his own Odysseus of sorts, Jacob would return several years later, miraculously, only to find his wife had married another. Rather than a good old-fashioned dueling, the two men came to an Continue Reading