Winston-Salem

Winston-Salem is a city in the Piedmont of North Carolina, United States, formed when the towns of Winston and Salem merged in 1913. The town of Salem came from the Moravian Church, and Winston grew on the tobacco trade.

The Moravian Church of Pennsylvania bought the Wachovia tract and founded Salem in 1766 as their church town, with a square, a meeting house and workshops of brick and timber. Winston was laid out to the north in the middle of the 19th century as the seat of Forsyth County. Richard Joshua Reynolds began making chewing tobacco there, and his company later created the Camel cigarette. The Reynolds Building, finished in the late 1920s, was the model for the design of the Empire State Building in New York.

Reynolds American, the maker of Camel and Newport cigarettes, still has its head office in the city. Hanesbrands sells Hanes T-shirts and underwear from its base in Winston-Salem, and Krispy Kreme began selling its glazed doughnuts from a shop in the city. Thin Moravian spice cookies and sugar cake are baked in Winston-Salem bakeries from old recipes.

Old Salem keeps the Moravian town as a living history museum, where cooks, tinsmiths and potters work in period dress. Reynolda House, the estate of the Reynolds family, holds a museum of American art. Wake Forest University moved to Winston-Salem in the 1950s on land given by the Reynolds family, and its campus lies next to the Reynolda estate.