Serendipity in Hickory

A man walking his cat in our RV park near Hickory, N.C.

Hickory, the penultimate stop on our 10-week tour of the Carolinas, was a throw-away; added to the agenda mainly because it has a minor-league baseball team and fit in nicely en the route to Asheville.

But our three-night stop in this burg famous for its furniture turned out to be full of pleasant surprises and unique serendipities when we used it as a base to explore the surrounding area.

Topping the serendipity list was our close-up encounter with the Governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, at a small event in Boone. Boone is near the Blue Ridge Parkway in the mountains north of Hickory and we drove up there mainly because it is home to Appalachian State University, which is the school that conferred a Masters degree on our soon-to-be daughter-in-law (before she went to law school and met Tex). Plus, we’d heard good things about Boone. So we went with no particular plan other than poking around the campus a bit, grabbing some lunch and stopping en route to tour Fort Defiance, the plantation home of Revolutionary War General William Lenoir.

The App State campus was pretty and pretty much empty but Boone was a beehive of activity. As we were strolling down one of the main streets shopping for the t-shirts that we so desperately don’t need I noticed a sign on the marquee of a small theater that said the governor would be there to speak in just a few hours!

Us and the App State Mountaineer

So we ate lunch, shopped for t-shirts and returned to the theater at the appointed hour and sure enough a crowd had gathered and before long a guy named John Cooper, who looked a lot like Gov. Roy Cooper, took the podium to talk a bit about the theater that he and other “Boonies” are endeavoring to refurbish and re-open. Then he introduced the governor.

We assumed John Cooper was Roy Cooper’s brother but it turns out they are not related. However, we later figured out that John Cooper and his wife Faye are the owners of the Mast General Stores.

That probably does not mean much to many readers and it wouldn’t have to us either except that, en route to North Carolina earlier this summer, we had by chance visited a Mast Store in Knoxville. We had never heard of Mast General Store but there are eight of them in the Appalachian region of Tennessee and the Carolinas and they seem to have a strong following for an eclectic, wide-ranging mix of products and a history that stretches back more than a century.

The governor gave a good, succinct stump speech before surprising the Masts with an award called the Order of the Long Leaf Pine.

We had never heard of the award either but, of course, our ears perked up when we heard the name of the award because of our experience and knowledge of the Long Leaf Pine gained at Moores Creek NB.

It turns out that North Carolina governors have presented more than 15,000 of these awards over the decades to confer “The Order of the Long Leaf Pine with the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary” on deserving people with North Carolina roots such as Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou, and Andy Griffith.

Once conferred these ambassadors have the “special privilege” to propose the following toast in “select company anywhere in the free world”. That toast reads as follows:

    Here's to the land of the long leaf pine,

    The summer land where the sun doth shine,

    Where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great,

    Here's to "Down Home," the Old North State!

    Here's to the land of the cotton bloom white,

    Where the scuppernong perfumes the breeze at night,

    Where the soft southern moss and jessamine mate,

    'Neath the murmuring pines of the Old North State!

    Here's to the land where the galax grows,

    Where the rhododendron's rosette glows,

    Where soars Mount Mitchell's summit great,

    In the "Land of the Sky," in the Old North State!

    Here's to the land where maidens are fair,

    Where friends are true and cold hearts rare,

    The near land, the dear land, whatever fate,

    The blessed land, the best land, the Old North State!

Needless to say we thought this was a glorious way to begin our final week in “the Old North State!”

The Saturday morning farmer's market in downtown Hickory.

In addition to the serendipitous trip to Boone we made an ill-fated attempt to visit the Sen. Sam Ervin (remember the Watergate hearings) historic site in Morganton (it’s closed on weekends); shopped at a great farmer's market in downtown Hickory; stopped in at the Fort Dobbs state historic site near Statesville; bought 13 pairs of socks at the Thorlo outlet store in Statesville, and; wrapped up our tour of the North Carolina stops on George Washington’s 1791 Southern Tour with a visit to Salisbury, which is also the home of Cheerwine (a popular soft drink in the Carolinas).

Been there, done that. With this stop in Salisbury we have now been to every place in N.C. - in many cases the exact places - that George Washington trod on his 1791 Southern Tour. (That's the Rowan County Courthouse in the background.)

Apparently Cheerwine is a big deal in North Carolina, still made in and distributed from Salisbury and sold in the stores throughout the state. But don't feel bad, I'd never heard of it either.

Of course we also attended a Hickory Crawdads baseball game and gave the park a good review, with high marks on several important ranking criteria such as “mascot availability” and “beer selection”. 

Our #5-ranked N.C. minor league stadium.

Conrad was not impressed with Betsy's claw but he still received high marks for "Mascot Accessibility".

An anonymous source inside the Pasley Administration has leaked information to the blog that I am planning a “grand finale blog post” that will reflect on and summarize our entire experience in North Carolina this summer. That same source has also disclosed a highly classified list indicating that the L.P. Frans Stadium, home of the the Hickory Crawdads, will end up ranked fifth on the list of 11 minor league stadiums/teams that we have visited here in North Carolina this summer.

Note: We are leaving North Carolina today and heading toward Lexington for the wedding. However, we've spent the last six days in Asheville and had a great time here so I hope to have a blog post out to report on some of those adventures soon. I hope to follow that up with a post wrapping up and reflecting on our travels through this beautiful and unique state that we've liked a lot better than we thought we would.