On May 17, 1956, Olympic gold medalist and professional boxer Charles Ray “Sugar Ray” Leonard was born in Wilmington.
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On May 16, 1804, Salem Academy opened the doors of its new dormitory, South Hall, to students and officially transitioned from a day school to a boarding school.
The Moravians had established the all-girls’ school in 1772 soon after the first women trekked 500 miles from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to join the community at Salem. One of their number, Elisabeth Oesterlein, became the first teacher at the school. The unmarried women of Salem, known as “single sisters,” governed the academy during this early period.
On May 16, 1771, the Battle of Alamance was fought. The two opposing forces were colonial militia, under the command of Governor William Tryon, and a band of frontier citizens known as Regulators, who raised arms against corrupt practices in local government. Tryon’s force of 1,100 men marched into Regulator country to subdue the uprisings. About 2,000 Regulators, armed with old muskets and makeshift weapons, organized near Tryon’s camp.
On May 16, 1961, Richard Corbitt, a well-known truck builder, died.
Corbitt began his business as a tobacco merchant in the 1890s before creating the Corbitt Buggy Company in 1899. Initially building horse drawn buggies to haul agricultural products, Corbitt’s company began to produce passenger cars and trucks, and later buses and military vehicles.
On May 15, 1918, Henry Beard Delany became the first black Episcopal bishop in North Carolina and only the second in the United States.
On May 15, 1950, W. E. Debnam published Weep No More, My Lady, his response to former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s newspaper column earlier that year.
On May 14, 1932, the North Carolina Symphony played its first concert at Hill Hall on the campus of UNC.
On May 14, 1889, the North Carolina Granite Company was founded in Surry County by Thomas Woodroffe. It has been in continuous operation since. Now known as the North Carolina Granite Corporation, it is the world’s largest open-faced granite quarry.
On May 13, 1913, the town of Salem and the city of Winston merged to form the new city of Winston-Salem through the election of a new unified city board.
The two municipalities that would eventually become Winston-Salem came from two strikingly different backgrounds. The town of Salem traced its lineage back to 1753, when it was established by Moravian Bishop August Spangenberg. Winston, named for Joseph Winston, was created in 1849 as the county seat for newly formed Forsyth County.