Onslow County

Coastal Onslow County, created as a precinct in 1734 and established as a county on March 4, 1739, has a population of 193,893 and a total employment of 49,357 (25.5%). The county seat is Jacksonville, which is about 120 miles from Raleigh and is home to U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, a 246-square-mile military training facility that was built in 1941.

The U.S. Department of Defense and the Marine base are two of the three largest employers in the county.

The county’s most profitable agricultural product is hogs/poultry, while the largest product by acreage is soybeans. The type of livestock produced most by total number is meat-type chickens/turkeys. The largest manufacturer is Stanadyne Automotive (the county’s sixteenth-largest employer), which manufactures fuel pumps and injectors, and employs between 100 and 249 people.

The community is served by Coastal Carolina Community College, a two-year school that is part of the 58-campus North Carolina Community College system and a satellite campus of UNC-Wilmington.

NC State is Here

North Carolina’s Largest Piece of Property

Hofmann Forest, the largest university-owned research forest in the world and the largest state-owned property in North Carolina, is a working, industrial-scale forest of 79,000 acres that spans Onslow and Jones counties. Located 150 miles from the Raleigh campus, Hofmann Forest is owned by the NC State Natural Resources Foundation and is named for pioneering Austrian-born forester Julius Hofmann.

Hofmann has a mix of managed pine plantations, natural pine and hardwood stands, along with some agricultural fields, providing College of Natural Resources students and faculty unique opportunities for research, demonstration and sustainable forest management. Numerous income sources on the property provide financial support to CNR. In 2016, a timber deed on 54,000 acres was sold to Resource Management Service, which provides consistent annual income to CNR scholarship funds.

Privately owned by the university, Hofmann Forest is not accessible or open to the public. However, Hofmann hosts many groups, both within and outside the forestry sector, to demonstrate the techniques and benefits of managed forests. The forest is available for NC State research, demonstration projects and educational visits.

Forest namesake Julius Hofmann was named the inaugural head of the NC State Department of Forestry in 1929. (Read more.)

Pride of the Pack

From Onslow County to Earth Orbit

Growing up in Jacksonville, Christina Hammock Koch rarely encountered female engineers. Yet she knew if she was ever going to fulfill her lifelong dream of traveling to space, her best path was through a strong STEM education.

So she went to the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Durham and NC State University in Raleigh. She earned three degrees from NC State — a bachelor’s degree in physics, and both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering — before pursuing her career goals in some of the most remote places on the planet: Antarctica, Alaska, Greenland and American Samoa.

Selected as part of NASA’s 2013 astronaut class, Koch spent two years training to go to the International Space Station. On March 14, she blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan as part of NASA space station missions 59 and 60, right in the middle of Women’s History Month.

She will spend nearly a year in space, conducting multiple research projects that will show the effects of an extended trip into outer space on the human body as well as gathering other important data for NASA research projects. When she returns to Earth, she will own the record the longest single spaceflight by a woman, with an expected total of 328 days in space.

On Aug. 30, with an NC State banner hanging from the interior of the station, Koch spent more than 20 minutes conducting a live video downlink from the space station to a roomful of more than 1,000 students, faculty and staff in Talley Student Union. Answering questions from both NCSSM and NC State students, Koch talked about what it was like to be a female astronaut, how both NCSSM and NC State prepared her for such an exciting and arduous journey and how she overcame the anxiety and difficulty of living without gravity some 250 miles above the earth’s surface for months at a time.

Follow Koch’s trip to space via social media @Astro_Christina on Twitter and @astro_christina on Instagram.

Fountain of Creativity: The NC State Alma Mater

Alvin Marcus Fountain, a native of Onslow County, was a regular contributor to the earliest editions of Technician, the college’s student newspaper. Though raised in the manner of a country bumpkin, Fountain appreciated literature and poetry, and it was a well-known secret that he frequently posted poems in the paper under the pseudonym “Zippy Mack.”

During a 1921 train trip to Camp McClellan in Alabama, Fountain and fellow NC State student Bonnie Frank Norris were teased by other military cadets because their school did not have an official fight song. On the spot they vowed to write one and give it as a gift to the class of 1923. Norris handled the music, while Fountain wrote five verses of lyrics.

Fountain earned a degree in mechanical engineering and was named valedictorian of his class. Rejecting offers from General Electric and Westinghouse, Fountain began his career with Carolina Power and Light so he could stay in Raleigh. He later earned a master’s degree in American literature from Columbia University in New York and a Ph.D in English from George Peabody College (now part of Vanderbilt University) in Nashville, Tennessee.

Fountain spent more than 40 years at NC State as an English professor, teaching courses in technical writing to fellow engineers. He also published two technical writing textbooks and was the faculty advisor for the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. In 1983, NC State named its new dining hall in his honor.

The ACC’s First No. 1 Overall Draft Pick

No Atlantic Coast Conference football player had ever been the No. 1 overall pick in the National Football League draft until NC State defensive end Mario Williams, of tiny Richlands, was taken by the Houston Texans on April 29, 2006, following his record-setting three-year career with the Wolfpack.

During his time at NC State Williams collected 25.5 career sacks and 55.5 career tackles for losses. He was twice named first-team All-ACC and was named a first-team All-American by Sports Illustrated in 2005.

Williams played in the NFL for seven years with the Texans, the Buffalo Bills and the Miami Dolphins, earning four trips to the Pro Bowl and being named first-team All-Pro in 2014.

He will be inducted into the NC State Athletic Hall of Fame in 2020. (Read more.)

Learn More