Chester

About 45 minutes from Charlotte in neighboring Cabarrus County, the owners of 1,000-acre Porter Farms raise chickens and pigs on part of their land. The chickens are sold to Tysons Foods, and the pigs become sausage, pork chops and spare ribs for Smithfield Foods. Another part of the property is a cattle farm, and since […]

Can philanthropy foster greater regional connection? Yes, according to our research for the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection project. But it’s not just the movement of money that matters, say local leaders: it’s the regional exchange of ideas about how to put that money to work that seems to make a difference. Community foundations, by definition, have […]

To move up the ladder of opportunity, there’s generally consensus that people need jobs that pay a living wage, where they can grow their earnings over time. But what’s the best way to get workers, especially low-income workers with barriers such as low educational attainment, connected to those jobs? That’s the focus of the ReCONNECT […]

While Duke was building the world’s largest electrical network in the Western Piedmont, some Charlotte mill owners recognized that more money could be made loaning money to aspiring industrialists than making cloth themselves.

From an agrarian system to an economy based on rural mills and factories drawing workers from former farms and sending goods to Charlotte for distribution, the region undergoes rapid change. 

A growing web of infrastructure and physical connections – both within the wider region and between the region and the outside world – has had a profound effect on where growth went, and where it stayed away from. People and industries in the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection study area followed trading paths, railroads, highways and, now, air service.

Clayton Hanson & Laura Simmons | Aug 26, 2019 Click anywhere on the map below to pause and play. Each dot represents 500 people. The dots are distributed randomly within each county and are not intended to correspond to specific places, but instead to give a general sense of the number of people residing in […]

Photographer Nancy Pierce’s visual story of people and places along U.S. 21 offers a window into the way the road, like the region, has reinvented itself over time. The map (left) shows the areas along U.S. 21 that the photo gallery shows. The links to the three inset areas give a PDF map with more […]

Contributor: Nancy Pierce Communities around the Charlotte region are building greenways for residents to use for walking, bicycling, hiking and even skating. The Carolina Thread Trail has played an important role in making these new pathways a growing transportation and recreation resource. The Foundation For The Carolinas helped initiate that project and The Catawba Lands Conservancy […]