From its beginnings as a regional spa resort and an exclusive community of wealthy tobacco and textile families, Winston-Salem's West End has become an island of calm in the midst of a bustling Southern city of 200,000 residents. Built around one of the first electric streetcar lines in the country, the West End boasted "Millionaires' Row," where the Reynolds and Hanes families kept homes bought with manufacturing fortunes. When urban re-design and the aging of the neighborhood in the 1960s threatened the West End's streetscape, local residents and friends stepped in to preserve its beauty.

Since it was chartered in 1857, Salem Cemetery reflects the personal taste and imagination of individuals who designed their family plots, vaults, and markers. A walk along the winding paths, noting names on markers and vaults, is a walk through the city's history, recalling the people who lived, labored, and loved here.

The Reynolds tobacco family was an American dynasty like the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Astors. R.J. "Dick" Reynolds Jr. was born into privilege and decadence, but his disastrous personal life eventually destroyed almost every relationship he cherished and stole his health at a relatively young age. Dick Reynolds was dubbed "Kid Carolina" when as a teenager, he ran away from home and stowed away as part of the crew on a freighter. For the rest of his life he'd turn to the sea, instead of his friends and family, for comfort. Dick disappeared for months at a time, leading the dual life of a business mogul and troubled soul, both of which became legendary. Despite his personal demons, Dick played a pivotal role in shaping twentieth-century America through his business savvy and politics. He developed Delta and Eastern Airlines, single handedly secured FDR's third term election, and served as mayor of Winston-Salem, where his tobacco fortune was built. Yet below the gilded surface lay a turbulent life of alcoholism, infidelity, and loneliness. His chaotic existence culminated in a surprise fourth marriage and was shortly followed by a strange death, the end of a life every bit as awe-inspiring as it was disturbing.

In the early twentieth century, Winston-Salem was hailed as the "town of a hundred millionaires." Booming tobacco and textile manufacturing industries converged to make Winston-Salem the largest and richest city in all of North Carolina, and major architects flocked to the area to design for its newly wealthy clientele. Ambitious commercial buildings and gracious suburban estates abounded, hosting generations of families that shaped the economic future of the country. Great Houses and Their Stories explores Winston-Salem's finest residential architecture from that era--its spacious mansions, palatial gardens, and even working farms--and delves deeply into the stories of the people who lived and worked in those historic buildings. This is a book for the preservationists, history buffs, and architecture lovers of the world and for the Winston-Salem residents who have always wondered about the abundance of green-roofed mansions still surviving in their city, even as similar pockets of early 20th century architecture throughout the country have been lost to time. Author Margaret Supplee Smith, Ph.D., and photographer Jackson Smith tell the rich histories of more than 75 great houses through beautiful new photography, historic photographs, personal narratives, and oral histories. Through diligent research of historical records and interviews with residents and local historians, they've uncovered fascinating stories about the families whose fortunes shaped neighborhoods like Buena Vista, West Highlands, and Reynolda Park. By publishing this book, Preservation North Carolina hopes to advance the preservation of Winston-Salem's rich architectural legacy, which is highly threatened by demolition and overdevelopment.

Double your chills by delving into the dual heritage of this North Carolina city—stories of haints, witches, ghosts, and beyond . . . Whether it was Winston, Salem, or Winston-Salem, the city has a rich history in the strange, unusual, and ghostly. Colonial Salem was once visited by George Washington, and accounts tell of the president entering the cave of three witches. Locals still see an old tobacco wagon rolling around the streets of Winston in the early morning, harkening back to the days when tobacco was king. Elaborate systems of tunnels and pipes once existed beneath the city that many believe were home to groups of chanting monks. Join author and historian Michael Bricker as he vividly retells these stories and more in a historically haunted guide to Winton-Salem. Includes photos!

Paradise Planned is the definitive history of the development of the garden suburb, a phenomenon that originated in England in the late eighteenth century, was quickly adopted in the United State and northern Europe, and gradually proliferated throughout the world. These bucolic settings offered an ideal lifestyle typically outside the city but accessible by streetcar, train, and automobile. Today, the principles of the garden city movement are once again in play, as retrofitting the suburbs has become a central issue in planning. Strategies are emerging that reflect the goals of garden suburbs in creating metropolitan communities that embrace both the intensity of the city and the tranquility of nature. Paradise Planned is the comprehensive, encyclopedic record of this movement, a vital contribution to architectural and planning history and an essential recourse for guiding the repair of the American townscape.

White supremacists determined what African Americans could do and where they could go in the Jim Crow South, but they were less successful in deciding where black people could live because different groups of white supremacists did not agree on the question of residential segregation. In Threatening Property, Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant investigates early-twentieth-century campaigns for residential segregation laws in North Carolina to show how the version of white supremacy supported by middle-class white people differed from that supported by the elites. Class divides prevented Jim Crow from expanding to the extent that it would require separate neighborhoods for black and white southerners as in apartheid South Africa. Herbin-Triant details the backlash against the economic successes of African Americans among middle-class whites, who claimed that they wished to protect property values and so campaigned for residential segregation laws both in the city and the countryside, where their actions were modeled on South Africa’s Natives Land Act. White elites blocked these efforts, primarily because it was against their financial interest to remove the black workers that they employed in their homes, farms, and factories. Herbin-Triant explores what the split over residential segregation laws reveals about competing versions of white supremacy and about the position of middling whites in a region dominated by elite planters and businessmen. An illuminating work of social and political history, Threatening Property puts class front and center in explaining conflict over the expansion of segregation laws into private property.

Law and Society in the South reconstructs eight pivotal legal disputes heard in North Carolina courts between the 1830s and the 1970s and examines some of the most controversial issues of southern history, including white supremacy and race relations, the teaching of evolution in public schools, and Prohibition. Finally, the book explores the various ways in which law and society interacted in the South during the civil rights era. The voices of racial minorities-some urging integration, others opposing it-grew more audible within the legal system during this time. Law and Society in the South divulges the true nature of the courts: as the unpredictable venues of intense battles between southerners as they endured dramatic changes in their governing values.

Selected from papers presented at the 2000 Citadel Conference on the South, this collection of essays casts additional light on the southern experience and illuminates some of the directions its formal study may take in the new century. Emory Thomas opens the collection with a meditation on the shortcomings of the historical literature on the Civil War era. Essays by James McMillin, Kirsten Wood, and Patrick Breen revise estimates about the volume of the African slave trade, reveal how white widows embraced paternalism, and explore new ramifications of the fear of slave insurrection. Essays by Christopher Phillips on the birth of southern identity and by Brian Dirck and Christopher Waldrep on the key role language played in waging and in resolving the Civil War round out the discussion of the Old South. Turning to the New South, the next groups of essays examine religion and race relations during the Jim Crow era. Paul Harvey, Joan Marie Johnson, James O. Farmer Jr., and William Glass show how the beliefs of various Protestant churches - Pentecostal, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Methodist - produced surprising episodes of racial interaction, gave rise to at least one vocal c

Washington Park and its neighborhood are steeped in history. When the Moravians settled in Salem in 1766, the hills to the south were used for hunting and, eventually, farming. In the late 1880s, when it became fashionable to build homes on elevated land, the bluffs became one of the most desirable residential areas to emerge in the early decades of Winston-Salems boom. The plan for its development, built around the electric streetcar line, was designed by Jacob Lott Ludlow, who was also responsible for the West End plat. The Washington Park neighborhood became home to many of the areas wealthiest families, as well as the burgeoning middle class. Their lives, traditions, and habits helped shape the future of Winston-Salem. Today Washington Park is known for its grand mansions, nestled among the many bungalows, with superb views of downtown high-rises. The park, with its rolling hills and beautiful trails, provides a playground for the young and old alike. With the North Carolina School of the Arts located next door, the neighborhood is eclectic, elegant, and unique. This diversity has attracted a varied group of residents, all of whom share pride in their home, gardens, and noted creativity.