Winston-Salem

NCPride, a statewide LGBT organization, held annual pride parades that rotated host cities before settling at Duke's East Campus in Durham in 2000; Winston-Salem was chosen as host city for the 1996 parade. [outhistory.org] Organizers of the 1996 Winston-Salem parade expected about 10,000 attendees; estimates from attendees ranged 5,000–10,000, while police estimated about half that. [outhistory.org] Cheryl Hopkins, co-chairwoman of the 1996 parade and its associated events, wrote that one goal of the parade was to 'raise awareness within the community and begin a dialogue on gay issues.' [outhistory.org] The motto for the 1996 parade was 'Celebrate, Activate, Educate.' [outhistory.org] A counter-protest organized by a group called 'Churches for Christian Family Values' was held about three weeks after the 1996 parade and was estimated (per a News and Record article) to have drawn about 12,000 marchers, more than the pride parade itself. [outhistory.org] Local alderman Robert Nordlander attempted to pass a Charlotte-area (Winston-Salem) board of aldermen resolution denouncing homosexuality around the time of the 1996 parade. [outhistory.org] The German immigrant master potter Gottfried Aust settled in October 1755 at Bethabara, one of the earliest Moravian communities in North Carolina, to establish the first Moravian potter's shop there. He and his apprentices and journeymen, including Rudolph Christ, were some of the earliest American potters to experiment with the production of creamware, white salt-glazed stoneware, and tin-glazed earthenware. [Immigrant Entrepreneurship (German Historical Institute)] Aust moved the pottery to the newly built Moravian community of Salem in 1771, and was master potter in Wachovia for thirty-three years. Rudolph Christ, who had been apprenticed to him around 1766, was allowed his own pottery works at Bethabara in 1785 and took over the Salem pottery in 1789, the year after Aust's death. [Immigrant Entrepreneurship (German Historical Institute)] Aust made a slip-decorated redware shop sign in 1773 — an enormous plate carrying his name, with two lugs on the back for hanging — after a church board directive that trades post signs. Including both stylized and realistic flowers and Aust's trademark dramatic foliage, as well as a dove in flight and a tiled diamond, the sign serves as a record of the techniques and motifs he and those he trained used on the plates made in the Bethabara and Salem potteries. [Immigrant Entrepreneurship (German Historical Institute)] Rudolph Christ introduced the press-molded figural bottle, one of the most collectable forms of North Carolina Moravian pottery. The pottery inventory taken in 1800 is the first to list animal bottles of any kind, beginning with a turtle bottle whose mold was taken from a real turtle; over the next few years the range grew to include fish, squirrels, crayfish, owls and foxes. [Immigrant Entrepreneurship (German Historical Institute)] The Moravian Church owned the pottery operation and paid the master potters a salary of half the annual profit; it ran as a church-owned business in Salem until 1829. The tradition was carried on by Henry Shaffner, a potter recruited from the Moravian community of Neuweid in the German Rhineland, who arrived in 1833 and with his apprentice Daniel Krause kept the Salem pottery profitable into the late nineteenth century — nearly 150 years of Moravian pottery in all. [Immigrant Entrepreneurship (German Historical Institute)] Old Salem houses the most comprehensive collection of Moravian ceramics in America — the potters of Salem and the surrounding area produced slip-decorated dishes and other tableware as well as sculptural bottle forms. The collection is displayed in the Dianne H. Furr Moravian Decorative Arts Gallery and the William C. and Susan S. Mariner Southern Ceramics Gallery, and Old Salem's craftspeople throw pots daily at the T. Bagge Pottery on Main Street. [Old Salem Museums & Gardens] On 9 August 1949 the first locally-established arts council in the United States was formed in Winston-Salem. [NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources] The Junior League of Winston-Salem had brought the national community arts consultant Virginia Lee Comer to town in 1943 to study the cultural life of the community; her strategy for cultural planning was to build connections between the community and its arts activities. The Junior League set aside $7,200 of seed money in 1946, and in 1949 representatives from twelve cultural groups convened to form the council. [NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources] The Moravians who settled the area in the 1700s were known widely for their functional yet beautiful handiwork — pottery, cabinetry, guns, silver and tin wares — and also brought a strong musical heritage from Europe. [Digital Forsyth] The Arts and Crafts Workshop formed in 1945, providing classes, exhibits and outreach initiatives, and later became the Sawtooth School for Visual Art. In 1958 it moved into the J. G. Hanes Community Center, which housed the Arts Council and its 22 organizations, the Chamber of Commerce and a theatre. [Digital Forsyth] By the middle of the twentieth century the encroachment of modern development was obliterating the old Moravian settlement. A Citizens Committee formed in 1947 under its chairman C. T. Leinbach recommended zoning protection for the historic district, which directly resulted in the formation of Old Salem, Inc. in 1950. [Digital Forsyth] In the 1960s several North Carolina cities competed to host the North Carolina School of the Arts, now the University of North Carolina School of the Arts; Winston-Salem was selected, the General Assembly appropriated the funds in 1964, and the school opened the next year. [Digital Forsyth] Reynolda was built between 1912 and 1917 for Richard Joshua and Katharine Reynolds, who worked with the Philadelphia architect Charles Barton Keen and the landscape architect Thomas Sears to design the 1,067-acre property about three and a half miles northwest of downtown Winston-Salem. The design was based on the American country house movement; its materials are white stucco walls, large native fieldstone retaining walls, a green clay-tile roof, reinforced concrete and hollow tiles, and Keen hired Philadelphia artisans to craft the ironwork and interior ornamentation. [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)] Katharine Reynolds envisioned the property as a self-sustaining estate — a house and farm that would demonstrate progressive agricultural practices for improving rural life, with its own farms, gardens, greenhouses, service stations and power plant. Construction took five years, longer than planned, as the approach of the First World War made materials hard to obtain and drafted many of the workers. [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)] The Babcock family, who bought the estate in 1935, sold or donated much of its acreage, including 600 acres for the relocation of Wake Forest College to Winston-Salem. Charlie Babcock founded the nonprofit Reynolda House, Inc. in 1964, and under the leadership of his daughter Barbara Babcock Millhouse the house opened as the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in 1967. It became formally affiliated with Wake Forest University in 2002 and added a 31,619-square-foot wing in 2005, during which the house was restored to its 1917 appearance. [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)] The institution at 750 Marguerite Drive opened in 1956 as an exhibition space devoted to work by local artists, and was known as the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art until 2007. It received a new home when the industrialist James G. Hanes willed his 32-acre estate to it in 1972; renovation of the Hanes mansion, plus a gallery addition and receiving area, was completed in 1976. [NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina)] During that period the centre began an artist support programme, the National Endowment for the Arts/SECCA Southeastern Artists Fellowships, later the SECCA/R. J. Reynolds Artists Fellowships; in 1981 it expanded the programme nationally as Awards in the Visual Arts, which for ten years awarded fellowships and funded museum exhibitions and a purchase programme. In 1994 SECCA initiated the Artist and the Community Project, a series of residencies producing new work on issues critical to the local community. [NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina)] A 24,500-square-foot addition in 1990 shifted the centre's focus to exhibiting major contemporary artists from around the country while maintaining its commitment to southeastern artists, and the McChesney Scott Dunn Auditorium allowed it to offer contemporary music, drama, dance and film. The State of North Carolina formally assumed operations on 13 December 2007. [NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina)] R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company president Bowman Gray, Sr. commissioned the New York architects R. H. Shreve and William F. Lamb to design the company's headquarters in the Art Deco style. The $2 million, limestone-faced, 22-story tower opened for business on 23 April 1929 and became the tallest building in the South, surpassing the 1923 Jefferson Standard Building in Greensboro. [NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources] Shreve and Lamb, with their new partner Arthur Harmon, went on to design Manhattan's Empire State Building, completed in 1931; the two buildings share a sleek, streamlined exterior with a distinctive stepped ziggurat roofline. [NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources]

“signs be placed on the houses of those having professions, and on the Store and the Tavern, for the convenience of strangers coming to town. The sign should give the name of the master and his profession… Gottfried Aust, a potter.” [Immigrant Entrepreneurship (German Historical Institute)]

“to serve those members and to plan, coordinate, promote, and sponsor the opportunity for, and the appreciation of, cultural activities in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County.” [NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources]

“The groundwork for a thriving arts culture in the Winston-Salem area was laid by these German-speaking pioneers, whose art was interwoven with daily life.” [Digital Forsyth]