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Winston Salem
Winston Salem is a city in north central North Carolina and seat of Forsyth County, on the Piedmont Plateau. Business and medical services and research dominate the city's economy. Manufactures include apparel, fiber optic cable, textiles, electronic and medical equipment, processed food, and tobacco products, which were once Winston-Salem's primary industry.
The city is the seat of Salem College (1772), Wake Forest University (1834), Winston-Salem State University (1892), Piedmont Bible College (1945), Winston-Salem Bible College (1945), North Carolina School of the Arts (1963), and a community college. In the city is Historic Bethabara Park, a restoration of the first settlement (1753) in North Carolina by members of the Moravian Church, containing the oldest Moravian church in the southern United States. The park also has a reconstruction of a fort on its original site and colonial gardens.
Other points of interest are Old Salem, which encompasses more than 50 buildings dating from the 1760s to the 1860s and includes the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts on its premises; the Reynolda House Museum of American Art, built by tobacco company founder R. J. Reynolds; the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art; and the Wake Forest University Museum of Anthropology. SciWorks, an interactive science and environmental museum, is just north of the city. Each year the city hosts a major professional golf tournament.
In 1753 German-speaking Moravians from Pennsylvania formed the temporary settlement of Bethabara (House of Passage). In 1766 they laid out the permanent community of Salem, the name being derived from the Hebrew word shalom (peace). Winston was established nearby in 1849 and named for Major Joseph Winston, a hero of the American Revolution (1775-1783). The city grew rapidly on the strength of its tobacco and textile industries. The two towns merged, and the city incorporated, in 1913. Many of Winston-Salem's institutions were built with funding from the city's tobacco manufacturers.
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