Caldwell County

Caldwell County, established in 1841, is located 185 miles due west of Raleigh and is part of the Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton Metropolitan Statistical Area. Its county seat is the foothills town of Lenoir, a traditional hub of North Carolina’s furniture-making industry.

The county’s most profitable agricultural product is nursery/floriculture, and the largest agricultural product by acreage is forage land for grain production.

The type of livestock produced most by total number is meat-type chickens. The largest manufacturer is Bernhardt Furniture (the county’s third-largest employer), which manufactures home furnishings and employs more than 1,000 people.

The county is home to Caldwell Community and Technical Institute and the Appalachian State University Center at Caldwell, a distance education site for ASU.

Google has operated a large-scale, $1.8 billion data center in Lenoir since 2009, which created some 135 STEM-based jobs for Caldwell County residents.

Pride of the Pack

Designer of Journalism’s Future

Richard Curtis, founding editor of visual design for USA Today and former editor-in-chief of Technician, was born in Hudson, a small town in the foothills of Caldwell County.

After graduating from NC State’s College of Design in 1971, Curtis worked for newspapers in Baltimore, St. Petersburg and Miami for nearly 10 years. In January 1982, he was named the visual editor of the fledgling national newspaper USA Today, which offered brightly colored pages filled with photos, graphics and illustrations under Curtis’ direction. The newspaper — the flagship publication of the Gannett Company — is the most widely circulated paper in the country, along with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Curtis spent 27 years with the newspaper until his retirement in 2008. He is a generous donor to his alma mater and has served as a member of the Alumni Association magazine’s editorial advisory board.

He was inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame in 1997. (Read more about Richard Curtis.)

Commissioner of Agriculture Samuel Patterson

Samuel Patterson, namesake of NC State’s Patterson Hall, was born at his family home on the banks of the Yadkin River in Caldwell County.

Serving as the North Carolina Commissioner of Agriculture during NC State’s earliest days, Patterson had a big impact on the land-grant college. The building that bears his name houses the administrative offices of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

In Patterson’s opinion, the building that is his legacy should not have been located on NC State’s campus. He thought it should be in downtown Raleigh, along with other official state buildings. Instead, the school built it on what was then the highest point on campus, known colloquially as Ag Hill. It was built during the 1904-05 school year, dedicated in 1906 as Agricultural Hall and renamed for Patterson in 1912.

(Read more about Samuel Patterson here and more about the 100th anniversary of Patterson Hall here.)

 

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