Winston-Salem, North Carolina

After we crossed the mountains, the sun finally made an appearance.

The current city of Winston-Salem began as two separate towns, and neither of them were named after cigarettes.  The town of Salem was founded in 1753 by Moravian settlers from Pennsylvania.  Many of the old buildings of this settlement have been preserved.  These houses were among the first constructed by the settlers.

This is the famous Mickey Coffee Pot, constructed of tin in 1858 by the Mickey brothers, Moravian descendants of the founders of Salem.  It is seven feet tall and originally stood outside the brothers' tin shop as an advertisement for the quality of their work as tinsmiths.

This seashell gas station is the last remaining of eight such stations built in the 1930s.  They were constructed of bent green wood, wire mesh and concrete stucco by a Winston-Salem based distributor of Shell gasoline.

We drove to the nearby town of Greensboro in order to visit the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.  The museum is housed in the former F W Woolworth building.  In 1960, four African-American students from nearby North Carolina A&T purchased items in the "Negro" section of Woolworth's, then sat at the "white's only" lunch counter, ordered coffee and were refused service and told to leave.  They refused to leave until the store closed.  Over the course of four consecutive days, the sit-ins grew from the original four protestors to 300, and included the lunch counter at the nearby S H Kress dept. store. Within a few months similar protests had spread to 26 cities throughout the south involving 7,000 protestors.