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There weren’t many cars on the 5:30 a.m. ferry. Under the full April moon, a deckhand swept his fingers across his throat: a silent signal to kill my engine. We departed, crossing the Cape Fear River where it braids the tides of the Atlantic Ocean and brackish currents flow simultaneously in different directions.
All around at distances impossible to gauge, fuzzy pinpoints of guiding lights flashed in the dawn. I felt the rumble of the ship’s engine with its steady white noise. The gentle rocking is enough to lull me back to sleep in my four-door sedan.
After a bump and a pneumatic whir, we docked efficiently. Crew and ship negotiate this 35-minute trip between the Southport and Fort Fisher terminals over a dozen times each way most days, no matter the time of year.
I drove off the vessel and took a right toward the boat launch. The end of the road is a good place to watch the sun rise. There was no one out there, except a couple of cyclists for a moment.
The moon stuck there above the manmade jetty, a rose bloom unmoved by the rising of the light. It was a “pink” moon, a harbinger of good things to come according to the almanacs of yore.
This is where I began, in a place that knew conflict and cannon balls before the asphalt and snack machines.
This is U.S. 421.
To look at this route on a map is to see something like the profile of a playground slide. The eye traces a backslash as it slices the state in half from its southeastern to northwestern corners. A major push for new corporate investment and suburbanization fueled my expectation to find more than just a highway dividing North Carolina.
Inherent in any system of economic development is an idea of hope. Hope for jobs. Hope for small business support. Hope for new spaces bolstering rather than supplanting old ones.
Although not the primary target of their efforts, organizations responsible for promoting economic development are quick to promise locals such things. Usually with a cliche quip about how “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
If you begin a similar road trip with a ferry ride at sea level and end it watching a cow drink from a mountain stream, as I did, U.S. 421 will have taken you over 300 miles northwest while climbing over 3,000 feet through 14 of the state’s 100 counties.
Eight of those counties help make up what Piedmont Triad Partnership, a private economic development interest group careful not to label themselves as lobbyists, branded as the “Carolina Core.” The effort, funded mainly by private contributions, markets the region as desirable to big companies and new worker talent.
The organization lists 55 board members and investors on its website, almost all of them CEOs, presidents, and managing partners in healthcare, higher education, banking, law firms, utilities, and development. There’s even a CEO of a PGA tour golf tournament.
There’s very little Black and Latino representation on the board, in a place where those groups make up nearly a third of the population. And less than a quarter of the board shaping the future of life and work in this region is made up of women.
From the Civil War site, the highway shoots up north along the coast. The oceanfront homes I remember from childhood fishing trips in the 1990s have mostly vanished. The ones that stand in their place aren’t as close to the ground and obscure the seaside sunrise.
I passed the Kure Beach Pier, built for the first time a century ago during Calvin Coolidge’s first term as president. It’s still free to walk the planks, but nowadays you have to pay the town to park.
I kept driving and every now and then one of the few remaining working-class ranch homes appeared with a gnarled cypress out front. They felt sunken compared to their towering neighbors. How had they survived the storms, meteorological or economic?
From there I drove up through Wilmington, a good example of a city that seems to be growing in every aspect except infrastructure–a recurrent conundrum of development in North Carolina.
Half an hour beyond the industrial sites in the northwestern part of the city, the land opens up and the divide between perspectives widens. Some see this land as unspoiled, while others see it as undeveloped.
The town of Harrells (that’s Harrells with an “s,” as NC Rabbit Hole officially verified) is the first inkling of a return to civilization, be it an agrarian one. Blueberry season was about to kick off, and that always brings many contract workers.
There’s two places in Harrells where you have a good chance of finding these workers when they’re off the job. One is Clear Run Farms Fresh Market, where you can get a rare eastern-N.C. version of pork pudding and breakfast biscuits in the back.
Named after the main crossroads in Harrells, El Crucero Tienda y Taqueria is the other. After an 18-month renovation by new owners, the old hot dog and hamburger joint became the new spot for tacos and tortas a few months ago.
Chelsea Fugon manages the taqueria side of the business.
“Everybody in Harrells comes here,” she said. “But the medicines and brands we carry do make the contract workers feel more comfortable.”
It was breakfast time, but Fugon urged me to try the huaraches with lengua. I brought it outside, using my trunk as a table. Tractor-trailers barrelled just a few feet away on 421. Their windy wake threatened to steal my napkins.
From there, I went on for about an hour until I entered Harnett County. Westbound, I spotted the first of many green signs to feature the Carolina Core motto: “Your Next Big Move.”
From here to Greensboro a new designation is forthcoming, replacing vintage black and white U.S. Route shields with the red, white, and blue I-685 markings.
This is also where megasite territory begins, here in the place Link Wray once described as an old country backwater in his ‘70s ode to the Black River Swamp.
Megasite is developer jargon for large areas of remote rural land identified by private developers, governments, and universities as perfect for shovel-ready projects. Regional institutions and their partners will pave the way to land job creators, quite literally in the form of extensive infrastructure upgrades. Access to multi-laned highways, rail, and ports (water and air) is always a plus since these large projects have high-volume transportation needs. Third parties will certify these properties, four of which are focal points for Piedmont Triad Partnership, though there are more megasites throughout North Carolina.
Environmental and residential impact studies are often assessed. Companies generally want to know if wetlands are at risk or if there’s enough housing available, that kind of thing.
The megasite theory is simple. Companies are more likely to locate their operations where most of the groundwork is already done for them. In return, once everything is up and running, governments should collect more taxes. Local universities and community colleges who pitched in with the research of the area should benefit too.
More students means more workers. The companies get a steady supply of these skilled laborers who pay the government taxes. Employees have babies who eventually go to these schools and work at these companies and pay taxes and so on.
With reduced obstacles to establishing manufacturing facilities within close proximity to regional resources and “foreign trade zones” (another phrase outside of my everyday usage) these districts are the new currency of land development pitches. Exactly the kind of thing organizations (there are a lot) like Greensboro-based Piedmont Triad Partnership tout to lure corporate site selectors.
The partnership lead and participate in tours of these sites, four of which are in the Carolina Core. The group points out the region is now home to significant job-creating projects from companies like Toyota, Honda Aircraft, Vinfast, Pfizer, Amazon, and FedEx.
Enter Dunn, a time capsule of a town and southernmost on the Carolina Core map. It’s the kind of place that feels small, yet sustainable. An example of the kind of place regional megasite development has the potential to change drastically.
As 421 cuts through historic downtown Dunn, the local newspaper is just a turn away. The Daily Record has resisted its rampant industry buyouts and foldings. I spent an afternoon in their archives, flipping through newsprints amid keyboards clacking and advertising sales calls. Every so often a train would pass close enough to shake the building as its horn blared.
I walked across the street and visited Coffee on Broad, where local owners Seth and Angela Gundersen run the show. Angela brewed me an espresso while Seth helped their son with his homework. The Gundersens recently opened this brick-and-mortar after seeing success with Erwin Mills Coffee, a mobile coffee trailer they named after the neighboring community where they live.
Erwin had a manufacturing plant and was once known locally as the denim capital of the world. It operated for nearly a century until 1986. A New York-based investment group purchased the site in 2023 and is currently redeveloping it.
“I don’t know if it will work, but it’s a way to keep the town of Erwin on the map,” Seth Gundersen told me.
He’s also a member of a Dunn economic development group, and beamed with civic pride as he spoke of the successful effort to keep the local jewelry store afloat.
I asked him if there’s a sense they need more help, be it from the government or expanding corporations.
“We don’t need a savior,” he said. “We’ve got one. And his name is Jesus Christ.”
The ghosts of textiles, tobacco, and furniture linger along 421. The old holy trinity of legacy industry has been leavened with real estate and retail, healthcare, and higher education. After the state government, North Carolina’s largest private employers are WalMart and Duke University.
I grabbed lunch in Lillington at Bridany’s, a Colombian-inspired spot. The beans alone, pure savory with a sweet hint of shaved panela, will revitalize the weariest of travelers. Owner Juanita Bornshein asked if she could sit with me while I ate.
All the recipes are hers, she explained. Her mother taught her, and every time she cooks she is with her again.
The restaurant’s name is a portmanteau of the names of Bornshein’s children: Brianna, Daniella, and Nicholas. This is another spot that’s been open for less than a year. Another example of the little places that pop up without the help of global marketing campaigns.
Bornshein shared something with me, and though I’ve heard others express this, I believed her more than anyone else.
“You want to know the secret ingredient?” she whispered.
I thought it may have been the shaved raw sugar cane, but I nodded for her to tell me.
“Love. It’s love. It really is.”
Bornshein made me a believer. If there was a best bite of the trip, this was it. I had never been more enthused about beans in my life—every bite was better than the last.
Drive any old highway in North Carolina and eat your way along it. You will learn more about its people than by any other means.
Raven Rock State Park is 15 minutes west of Bridany’s. It’s where the rocks start to get harder and the soft sandy soil of the coastal plain begins its shift to the red clay of the foothills.
And then there was Harrington’s, an open-air flea market between Lillington and Sanford. It’s a place that may just do more for sustainability than any other business on the highway. Reduce, reuse, recycle is on full display. There’s also coconut water prepared á la minute, poured over its carved white fleshy innards after the shell is cracked with a meat cleaver.
Roadside development begins in earnest here. The lanky pine groves are replaced by signs for “new homes.” Raleigh is due north and Fayetteville due south as the megasites and universities near, catnip for global corporations hungry for land incentives and a steady supply of workers.
After Sanford, the road becomes largely indistinguishable from the interstate it’s about to become. There’s not a lot that will change visually along these 60 miles of the route until you get to Greensboro. As I drove this stretch, it offered plenty of time to think about an upcoming interview.
A mythical winged lion stood guard at the entrance to Greensboro’s Grandover Resort, where I met Loren Hill, Carolina Core’s regional economic development director. The opulent 11-floor hotel is the centerpiece of the area, which also includes a couple golf courses.
I found Hill, the former head of economic development for the city of High Point, waiting outside the lobby-adjacent restaurant. He reached to shake my hand, immediately open and congenial. After morning meetings in rooms that bore names like Baroque and Riviera and Provincial, he was ready to eat.
Hill is typically the type of person I avoid for a story: someone with an agenda. He talked a bit about his role at first.
“I make speeches, promote the Carolina Core brand. I help my economic developers with projects when they need me,” said Hill. “I’m unofficially the Carolina Core brand ambassador, and I have a ball doing it.”
Hill had graduated from Ragsdale High School in Jamestown, just a few miles away and a couple of years ahead of former North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory. I had graduated from there, too, though three decades later. That wasn’t our only surprise connection.
Hill said he and his wife never had a son of their own, but do consider themselves American parents to someone who had attended Ragsdale as an exchange student. It turned out I knew Lasha, their Georgian son. He and I used to cut up in math class. North Carolina is a small world, after all.
I asked Hill if the business of marketing our mutually beloved home state could end up irrevocably changing North Carolina.
“You’ve got to find a new Mayberry,” he said, referencing the idyllic vision of small-town life depicted in The Andy Griffith Show. “This is not 1960s Mount Airy. Mount Airy is not 1960s Mount Airy.”
Hill knocked on the white tablecloth, a rare emphatic moment.
“We need local leaders to protect their residents, their citizens,” he said. “To be doing things now to prepare for what’s coming, to participate in the growth.”
Developers develop; if it’s not an axiom it should be. Which is to stay, change isn’t coming. It’s here. It’s hard to move on when you don’t know where you are going.
Hill used the word “evolutionary” more than once, underscoring how slow the process of economic development can take while at the same time giving smaller localities plenty of time to adapt. However, the selection process for these projects is urgent. If that weren’t the case, local governments and private investors wouldn’t need to enlist the help of Piedmont Triad Partnership.
“You’d much rather have ten 100-job companies than one 1,000-job company,” he explained. “These huge brands help you promote the message. Other companies pay attention if Toyota Battery is in this region.”
Hill stressed the importance of reworking regional infrastructure and allowing resources like water utilities to reach outside traditional boundaries. This fostering of collaboration beyond city and county lines is revolutionary in a business sense. Large institutions are slow to adopt new philosophies. His organization acts as a liaison, not so much as between government and business, but between government and new practices of governance.
“Greensboro in Guilford is supplying utilities to Toyota in Randolph County. That megasite would have never had water and sewer if Greensboro hadn’t agreed to send its utilities down there.”
Proximity to these regional resources is why those signs appeared at county lines along U.S. 421, what Hill referred to as the spine of the Carolina Core. The branding, according to Hill, represents “a new way of approaching a region.”
“When the Carolina Core brand was unveiled in 2018, it was a new way of looking at things,” he said. “Carolina Core embraced more territory than that because of the megasites along U.S. 421.”
Hill, I think, is more interested in the realities of a more connected future than the small-town myths of the past. And he sees himself as part of an unending process.
“This is an ongoing play. Theater stays open,” he said. “There’s a next act.”
I had entered the interview a bit cynical, with visions of trickle-down economics dancing in my head, but left optimistic. Hopeful, even.
I was only going to stay in Winston-Salem for a night. After everyone at the hotel assured me my room was the one with the ghost, I booked a second night. But that was more because I liked Sally, a sleepy feline who haunted the lobby.
The hotel, not far from 421 and just a walkable overpass away from downtown, had been a mill in the old days. Someone long ago had allegedly pushed a young worker out of a window before this place got a better sense of hospitality.
The stay included a free drink so I descended into the basement bar. It was empty and I immediately pictured Jack Nicholson and The Gold Room.
Brett Mattingly appeared from the back, just as surprised to see another living being. I sat at the empty bar and talked shop with the bartender. Mattingly is a true hospitality journeyman who has worked about every job from nightclub bouncer to pizzaiolo at many clubs and restaurants around town. The scene keeps him busy and steadily employed.
From there, I walked downtown and found a city brimming with new life. It had serious Asheville circa 2011 vibes. People walked their pets at night. Bars and restaurants felt trendy and crowded, but not too much so.
After Winston-Salem, the first views of distant peaks came into focus as I approached North Wilkesboro. It’s a small town full of antique shops. I regret to say I didn’t stop here, but only so I didn’t get lost in a labyrinth of mid-century cookware and outdated maps.
After driving about a half hour west, I stopped at Corbett’s, a roadside produce stand. The open-air building was full of fresh strawberries red all the way through. They had just arrived from a farm in Supply, near where I had begun my trip.
I got on to Boone, which felt a bit claustrophobic at first. Like Wilmington, there’s not a lot of room for new roads here. So they build up.
I walked along King Street and stopped to speak with Taylor Higdon. She had waved at me sitting in the sun in front of the real estate agency where she works in marketing. All of a sudden things didn’t feel so cramped. The appeal of the place dawned on me. It was like a front porch.
Higdon said housing has become tough to find in Boone, expensive as any place she’d lived before, including major metropolitan areas like Atlanta.
We talked a bit about why North Carolina is so great, and it wasn’t long before she mentioned her grandmother taught Andy Griffith in second grade in Mount Airy.
There was a time when everyone in this state had some tale or connection to Griffith. He was part of the lore. But like barbecue, that’s becoming less and less. I didn’t encounter any barbecue along the road, and I didn’t miss it. The Latin food was plentiful, especially in Sanford, and good. That’s the new food story.
At this point in the trip, it was time for a haircut. Having grown up doing homework in the back of salons where my mother worked, I knew them as places full of garrulous people who told you exactly what’s on their minds. So I stopped at one right off 421.
As Ceirra Murphy cut my hair, she explained she was a fourth-generation stylist and that her mother, who stood at the neighboring chair brushing in highlights, used to cut Doc Watson’s hair. The section of 421 that runs alongside the salon is named for the beloved late musician from Deep Gap.
Murphy said she welcomes more people. More people means more business for her. And she wants everyone to enjoy this place. But she chooses to live in North Wilkesboro, a 30-mile trip east on U.S. 421 because that’s where she still feels the small-town lifestyle.
“When do we build so high that we can’t see the mountains,” Murphy asked as she snipped. “When does Boone stop being a mountain town?”
How one road trips reveals how one lives; an ever-transient activity to bring us face to face with that mythic monolith that chases us no matter how static or kinetic our momentum; it uncovers our relationship with loss.
I suppose 421 is about to become something else, at least for a little while. Something someone who is already there might not want, but also something that will develop into an unshakable nostalgia for someone else.
I spied a turn-off to Old U.S. 421 at the Tennessee border. The road curved steeply through blinky little mountain valley communities like Mabel, Amantha, and Cove Creek. There’s a big brick church down on the right, Henson Chapel United Methodist, that I swore looked brand new even though its construction began during Calvin Coolidge’s second administration.
There wasn’t anywhere to pull off to the side. I hadn’t seen any traffic for miles. I stopped and killed my engine. No cars approached from either direction.
Far from the megasites I had stopped moving, and I was moved. These old highways have a way of connecting you to the land and the people who live there, sometimes for mere seconds, in ways interstates can never replicate.
The sun hid behind a mountain, but all was bright. I heard new leaves murmur up in the trees, the flow of a nearby rocky stream, and the lumbering low of a cow dipping its head to drink. The same scene could have played out here a century ago; the newest thing seemed to be the road itself.
A soft breeze blew through the car. I bit into a strawberry. Everything was simple and small, and I didn’t want any of it to change.
Matthew Vincent is a freelance writer based out of Wilmington, N.C.