Eighty-one Miles from Greensboro
The truth is that I haven’t spent that much time in the South. A little time in Florida, a few nights in Louisiana, a few days in Alabama, and we’re done. However, I have spent some time studying North Carolina and its cities, particularly Greensboro and Asheville, because I’m interested in film and film-making, and North Carolina is a state generous to film-makers, attracting attention from anyone who wants to contribute to the art of cinema.
Greensboro itself, is the third largest city in North Carolina, with an estimated population of about two hundred and sixty thousand and lies where the I-85 and I-40 meet in central part of the state in the region of Piedmont (literally, the “foot of the mountains”).
If you were to check in today to one of the hotels Greensboro offers, you would find the city has combined with Winston-Salem and High Point to create the Triad, an area containing about a million people, filled with history and parks. The city gets its name from a Major General, Nathanael Greene, who commanded the American forces in 1781 at the Battle of Guilford Court House. Americans lost that particular battle but because of the casualties dealt to the British, Lord Cornwallis pulled his armies out of North Carolina and thus allowed American and French Troops to defeat him in Yorktown, Virginia. Twenty days of siege later and the American Revolution was finally over.
It’s points of history like these that make me realize I need to investigate places like Greensboro more. After all, as a citizen of the West Coast, and someone who didn’t travel East of the Mississippi until a quarter century of my life had passed, all I really knew about North Carolina I learned from 1960s television and The Andy Griffith Show, in which the fictional town of Mayberry was located about thirty miles or so from Raleigh, North Carolina, which, in turn, is located about eighty-one miles from Greensboro.
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