North Carolina Transportation: A Chronology of Invention and Technology
1849–1856: The North Carolina Railroad opens in sections between Goldsboro and Charlotte. Riders are excited at the great speed of the trains—about 14½ miles per hour! Towns along this transportation corridor will soon lead the state in population growth and industrial development. The area will become known as the Piedmont Crescent.
1854: A plank road connecting Fayetteville with Bethania, near Salem, is completed. At 129 miles, the Fayetteville and Western Plank Road is the longest plank road in the world.
1856: Work on the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal begins. Eventually, this canal will become a section of the Intracoastal Waterway.
1859: Cape Lookout Lighthouse is built to make shipping traffic along the coast safer.
1874: Stagecoach service to Charlotte is discontinued. Travelers now use trains, which cover much of the state with nearly 3,100 miles of track.
1887: Electricity has proven itself in Charlotte now that electric lights have been installed. Within five years, electric-powered streetcars will even replace the horse-drawn service that started earlier this year.
1888: Jerome Bolick, a buggy manufacturer in Conover, obtains four patents for a steel buggy wheel made with steel spokes. Advertisements brag that his “steel spokes [can be] replaced in five minutes using a monkey wrench”—much better than waiting for a wheelwright to disassemble an entire wooden wheel, carve a spoke to fit, and then reassemble—a process that takes at least a couple of hours. Interestingly, most of Bolick’s sales are to the North, where he buys his steel.
1889: North Carolina’s first electric streetcars begin service in Asheville.