Explore The South
NORTH CAROLINA, the most industrialized of the Southern states, breaks down into three distinct areas – the coast, the Piedmont and the mountains. The coast promises dazzling places to visit – stunning beaches and beautiful landscapes – as well as a fascinating history. The inner coast consists largely of the less developed Albemarle Peninsula, with colonial Edenton nearby. The central Piedmont is less appealing, dominated by manufacturing cities and the academic institutions of the prestigious “Research Triangle”: Raleigh, the state capital, is home to North Carolina State University; Durham has Duke; and the University of North Carolina is in trendy Chapel Hill. Winston-Salem combines tobacco culture and Moravian heritage, while the boomtown of Charlotte is distinguished by little but its downtown skyscrapers. In the Appalachian Mountains, alternative Asheville makes a hugely enjoyable stop along the spectacular Blue Ridge Parkway; Great Smoky Mountains National Park overlaps the border with Tennessee.
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Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill
CHAPEL HILL, on the southwest outskirts of Durham, is a liberal little college town with a strong music scene – having given birth to bands like Southern Culture on the Skids and Archers of Loaf, and musicians including Ben Folds and Ryan Adams, not to mention James “Carolina on My Mind” Taylor, it’s a regular on the indie band tour circuit. It’s a pleasant place to hang out, joining the students in the bars and cafés along Franklin Street, which fringes the north side of campus. Franklin continues west into the community of Carrboro, where it becomes Main Street; bars and restaurants here have a slightly hipper, post-collegiate edge.
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Blue Ridge Parkway
Blue Ridge Parkway
The best way to see the mountains of North Carolina is from the exhilarating Blue Ridge Parkway, which runs across the northwest of the state from Virginia to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The peak tourist season for the parkway is October, when the leaves of the deciduous trees turn vivid shades of yellow, gold and red. Year-round, however, this twisting mountain road – largely built in the 1930s by President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps volunteers – is a worthwhile vacation destination in itself, peppered with state-run campgrounds, short hiking trails and dramatic overlooks. Although the Parkway is closed to commercial vehicles, the constant curves make it hard to average anything approaching the 45mph speed limit.
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Roanoke: The Lost Colony
Roanoke: The Lost Colony
According to popular myth, the first English attempt to settle in North America – Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke – remains an unsolved mystery, in which the “Lost Colony” disappeared without trace. Sir Walter himself never visited North America. The original patent to establish a colony was granted by Queen Elizabeth I to his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, but Gilbert died following an abortive landfall in Newfoundland in 1583. Raleigh directed subsequent explorations further south; a 1584 expedition pinpointed Roanoke Island, behind the Outer Banks of North Carolina and thus hidden from the view of the Spanish, who were by now jealously patrolling the Atlantic seaboard from their bases in Florida. The English named the region Virginia, in honour of the Virgin Queen.
A party led by Ralph Lane in 1585 was interested in gold; their hopes of finding a fortune were quickly dashed, however, and the following year they sailed home with Sir Francis Drake, who visited on his way up from the West Indies. In 1587, 117 more colonists set off from England, intending to farm a more fertile site beside Chesapeake Bay; but, fearing Spanish attack, the ships that carried them dumped them at Roanoke once again. Their leader, John White, who went home to fetch supplies a month later, was stranded in England when war broke out with Spain, and the Spanish Armada set sail. When he finally managed to persuade a reluctant sea captain to carry him back to Roanoke in 1590, he found the island abandoned. Even so, he was reassured by the absence of the agreed distress signal (a carved Maltese cross), while the word “Croatoan” inscribed on a tree seemed a clear message that the colonists had moved south to the eponymous island. However, fearful of both the Spanish and of the approaching hurricane season, White’s crew refused to take him any further. There the story usually ends, with the colonists never seen again. In fact, during the next decade, several reports reached the subsequent, more durable colony of Jamestown (in what’s now Virginia), of English settlers being dispersed as slaves among the Native American tribes of North Carolina. Rather than admit their inability to rescue their fellow countrymen, and thus expose a vulnerability that might deter prospective settlers or investors, the Jamestown colonists seem simply to have written their predecessors out of history. In a little-known footnote, Roanoke Island gained and lost another colony during the Civil War. After it was captured by Union forces in February 1862, so many freed and runaway slaves made their way here through Confederate lines that the federal government formally declared it to be a “Freedmen’s Colony”. Around 4000 blacks were living on Roanoke by the end of the war, and many of the men served in the Union army. During Reconstruction, the government returned all land to its former owners, and the colony was disbanded. Roanoke retains a substantial black population to this day.
- Ocracoke ferries
