From Avalon to Eden:: A Postcard Tour of Rockingham County

The history of Rockingham County, North Carolina, is inseparable from the history of its streams and the textile communities which gradually formed around them. From the mighty Mayo, the location of the ill-fated mill fortress of Avalon in the early 1900s, to the birth of sweet Eden along the calm Smith River in the late 1960s, the residents of Rockingham County entered the twentieth century with an economy fueled by water—hydro dams for cotton mills, gristmills, and lumber yards—and by the...