On April 7, 1850, citizens in northwestern Guilford County met and appointed a board of trustees to erect a schoolhouse. The school would eventually become Oak Ridge Academy, the first coeducational military high school in the nation.
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On April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I.
That summer, Major General Leonard Wood, charged with selecting sites for new military camps, visited Charlotte as part of a tour of prospective locations in North Carolina. Wood chose the Queen City as the site for Camp Greene, a 2,300-acre military training facility for the Army.
On April 6, 1959, pioneering photographer Bayard Wootten died in New Bern.
Born in New Bern in 1875, Wootten left the area to attend college in Greensboro and then teach. She returned to New Bern to help family members. Once back, she did design work to support her family, eventually creating Pepsi-Cola’s first trademarked logo. She embraced photography in 1904 and, after displaying her first photograph that year, orders for her work began to roll in.
On April 5, 1986, author Manly Wade Wellman died in Chapel Hill.
Born in 1903 in the African nation of Angola where his father was a medical officer, Wellman returned to the United States with his family when he was 6. After receiving degrees from what is now Wichita State University and Columbia Law School, he moved to North Carolina in 1947.
On April 5, 1919, the Camp Bragg Flying Field was renamed in memory of First Lieutenant Harley Halbert Pope, the first officer assigned to the post. Pope had been killed when the Curtiss JN-4 Jenny he was flying crashed into the Cape Fear River earlier that year.
On April 5, 2000, stock car racing legend and NASCAR pioneer Lee Petty died in Greensboro. He was 86.
It wasn’t until age 35 that Petty began his racing career, driving a borrowed 1946 Buick Roadmaster in NASCAR’s first “strictly stock” race in June 1949 in Charlotte. That same year, Petty established a garage in a repurposed reaper shed on his family’s farm in Randleman. Over the course of his career, Petty claimed 50 wins, including three NASCAR championships and the top spot at the inaugural Daytona 500 in February 1959.
On April 5, 1976, James Baxter Hunt Jr. announced his intention to run for governor of North Carolina.
With 65 percent of the vote, Hunt handily won the election in 1976. He served as governor for a record-breaking sixteen years—with an eight-year break in between two sets of consecutive four-year terms.
On April 4, 1983, the North Carolina State University Wolfpack won the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
On April 4, 1929, the National Guard was called out by Governor O. Max Gardner to suppress a strike at the Loray Mill in Gastonia. Organized in 1900, the mill was the largest in North Carolina at the time. Employing more than 2,000 workers at its peak, the mill was also reported to be the largest factory under one roof in the United States.
On April 4, 1946, H. H. Brimley died.
Visitors to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in downtown Raleigh encounter one exhibit that is distinctly different from all the rest. It is the cluttered office of Herbert Hutchinson Brimley, the museum’s original curator and first director. Brimley’s tenure at the museum stretched from 1895 until his death more than 50 years later.