On August 22, 1914, Country Music Association founder Connie Barriot Gay was born in Lizard Lick in rural Wake County.
After working on his family’s tobacco farm as a youth, Gay become an agricultural extension agent. That job led him into radio broadcasting in the 1940s when he took over the Farm Security Administration’s National Farm and Home Hour.
On August 21, 1987, the blockbuster movie Dirty Dancing was released in theaters across the country.
Though set at a resort in the Catskills Mountains of Upstate New York, Dirty Dancing was shot entirely in Virginia and North Carolina. The filming came to the Southeast almost by accident. When the crew began production in September 1986, they found all the resorts in the New York mountains were closed, so they headed South.
On August 21, 1918, British forces began attacking German positions along a 10-mile stretch of the Western Front in northwest France. The assault was part of the World War I action now known as the Somme Offensive.
Attached to the British troops fighting in the region were the 119th and 120th U.S. Infantry Regiments, which both contained a number of Cherokee soldiers from western North Carolina.
On August 20, 1775, the Third Provincial Congress, formed to replace the Colonial Assembly dissolved by Royal Governor Josiah Martin the previous April, convened in Hillsborough.
Samuel Johnston of Edenton was selected to preside, and the body declared itself the province’s temporary government and created the Provincial Council to conduct business when the Provincial Congress was not in session and to oversee the Committee of Safety.
On August 19, 1956, the first Grandfather Mountain Highland Games were held near Linville.
The Grandfather Mountain games were conceived by Agnes MacRae Morton and Donald MacDonald. Already active in with several Scottish-affiliated organizations in the U.S., MacDonald was inspired to start games in North Carolina after attending a similar event on a trip to Scotland. Morton heard of a similar gathering in Connecticut and thought that Grandfather Mountain would be the perfect setting to try something comparable in North Carolina.