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Guilford County

Greensboro, North Carolina is the largest city in Guilford County and the largest in the Piedmont Triad region.

As of the 2000 census, the city population was 223,891, making it the third most populous city in North Carolina. Its estimated 2006 population is 240,955.

It is located at the intersection of two major interstate highways (I-85 and I-40) in the Piedmont ("foot of the mountains") region in central North Carolina.

In 1808, Greensborough (as it was spelled before 1895) was planned around a central courthouse square to replace Guilford Court House as the county seat. This act moved the county courts closer to the geographical center of the county, a location more easily reached by a greater number of the county's citizens.

In 2003, the previous Greensboro - Winston-Salem - High Point metropolitan statistical area (MSA) was re-defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget resulting in the formation of the Greensboro-High Point MSA and the Winston-Salem MSA. The 2006 population estimate for the Greensboro-High Point MSA was 685,378. The Greensboro - Winston-Salem - High Point combined statistical area (CSA), popularly referred to as the Piedmont Triad, had an estimated population of 1,513,576 in 2006. Source: US Bureau of the Census, Released April 2007

History of Guilford County

The county was formed in 1771 from parts of Rowan County and Orange County. It was named for Francis North, 1st Earl of Guildford, father of Frederick North, Lord North, British Prime Minister from 1770 to 1782. The Quaker church played a major role in the European settlement of the county, and numerous Quakers still live in the county.

On March 15, 1781, the Battle of Guilford Court House was fought in present-day Greensboro between Generals Charles Cornwallis and Nathanael Greene during the American Revolution. This battle marked a key turning point in the Revolutionary War in the South. Although General Cornwallis, the British Commander, held the field at the end of the battle, his losses were so severe that he decided to withdraw to the Carolina and Virginia coastline, where he could receive reinforcements and his battered army could be protected by the British Navy. His decision ultimately led to his defeat later in 1781 at Yorktown, Virginia, by a combined force of American and French troops and warships.

In 1779 the southern third of Guilford County became Randolph County. In 1785 the northern half of its remaining territory became Rockingham County.

Due to the large number of Quakers living in Guilford, many of the county's residents were opposed to slavery before the Civil War. The county was a stop on the famous Underground Railroad, which provided escaped slaves with a route to freedom in the North. Levi Coffin, one of the founders of the "railroad", was a Guilford County native. He is credited with personally helping over 2,000 slaves escape to freedom before the war.

In 1891, the county became home to the state's first and only publicly supported institution of higher learning for women, the State Normal and Industrial School. In 1932, the school became the Women's College of North Carolina when it joined with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and NC State University in Raleigh to form the Consolidated University of North Carolina. From the 1930's to the 1960's the Women's College was the third-largest women's university in the world. The school's name was changed a final time in 1963 when it began admitting men; it is now known as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

In 1960 Guilford County helped spark a major development in the American civil rights movement when four black students from the North Carolina A&T State University in Greensbboro started the first civil rightst sit-in. Known afterwards as the Greensboro Four, the four men deliberately sat at a "whites-only" lunch counter at the Woolworth's store in downtown Greensboro and asked to be served. They were arrested, but their action led to many other college students in Greensboro - including white students from Guilford College and the Women's College - to sit at the lunch counter in a show of support. Within two months the sit-in movement spread to 54 cities in 9 states; Woolworth's eventually agreed to desegregate its lunch counters and other restaurants in Southern towns and cities followed suit. A darker racial incident in 1979 was called the Greensboro massacre. In this incident the predominantly African American Communist Workers Party (CWP) led a march protesting the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups through a black neighborhood in southeastern Greensboro. They were attacked and shot at by the Ku Klux Klan and members of the American Nazi Party, several of the Communist Party marchers were killed or wounded in the attack. The case received further national publicity when the accused shooters were found "not guilty" by an all-white jury.