Let's Remember Some North Carolina Towns

I asked you all to name a town in this state. For science. More than 600 of you did.

Men have some weird-ass pastimes. This is one of them:

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If you watched the video above, what you saw was an extreme example of Remembering Some Guys. Basically, men can talk for a very long time about some guys who used to play sports. Not superstars. Just some guys. In fact, you get even more credit if you remember someone who is largely obscure. (My contribution to the video above would have been Mario Elie).

The clinical term Remembering Some Guys is relatively new—it was coined by some folks at Deadspin who have since gone on to found Defector. But the actual practice has been around a long time. For example: Look at this bit of Aaron Sorkin-written dialogue from an episode of “Sports Night” back in 1998:

Casey McCall: I'm sorry. I'm not very good at remembering names.
Monica Brazelton: Who was the number two man on the Boston Red Sox staff in 1977?
Casey McCall: That was Ferguson Jenkins.

If there’s one thing that men may do better than Remembering Some Guys, it’s Remembering Some Old TV Show/Movie Quotes.

I digress. Remembering any kind of stuff has been turned into an engagement hack online, where people basically say “hey, name a thing,” and then other people reply in a style that’s a race to obscurity. May I present Exhibit A:

That Tweet has 20 million impressions and 19,000+ replies! The most viewed reply to that tweet seems to be “Firefly,” a show that only ran for 14 episodes AND WENT OFF THE AIR 21 YEARS AGO.

I tend to be a little bit cynical about these sorts of things. And yet, I am not above them. So without giving it much thought, I tweeted this out earlier this week:

Yeah, it worked. As of Wednesday night when I stopped counting, those five words elicited 619 responses across Twitter, Threads, and Bluesky. I did not ask people to name a CATEGORY of North Carolina town. I did not give parameters. In fact, hardly anyone asked WHY I was asking, except for this guy:

So I did what any reasonable person would do here: I logged every single town that you all named, dropped them into a spreadsheet, ranked them in order of popularity, and then put them into a chart. You know, for science. Here’s what I got:

I cut this off at three mentions, even though there were 114 places that were named at least twice. This says something about memory. About location. About nostalgia. About the need to show a deep familiarity with a place as a form of street cred. Or not. The town of Climax was stuck in a lot of y’all’s memories and I’ll let you all decide whether you have some Freudian issues to work out.

Anyhow, I’ve wasted enough of your time. So since you’ve come this far, let me waste more of it. I’ll go over some of the most popular places, and then pick out some that deserve a little more attention.

Conetoe (Overall Winner)

Here is what Conetoe looks like:

It’s home to about 297 people. It’s in Edgecombe County southeast of Tarboro. The high school closed in 1971. It had a long-abandoned row of buildings that was “downtown” along Railroad Street, but they were demolished sometime in the last decade. It’s a predominantly Black community, which is reflected by both the U.S. Census and the person who put “Conetoe Black Community” as a landmark on Google Maps.

I didn’t ask why you all seem to be remembering Conetoe, especially since I’m guessing many of you have never stopped there. I’m guessing it’s largely because it’s a bit of a purity test. You have to pronounce Conetoe a certain way or you’ll get clowned on by Real North Carolinians. (It’s kuh-NEE-tuh.)

Bat Cave (2nd Place)

Yes, there is an actual bat cave, and no, you can’t go inside. It’s a big ass cave though. Real gneiss. Also, TECHNICALLY, Bat Cave isn’t a town (it doesn’t have a mayor, town council, that sort of thing). Then again, many of these places are just crossroads with names and not incorporated towns, so don’t come at me here, I am merely reflecting the will of the people.

Climax and Lizard Lick (Tied for 3rd Place)

(Barry White voice) The climax IS the high point.

Climax (also not a town!) was named that because it was the high point along a railroad, and it’s also close to the actual City of High Point, which was also named because it was the high point along a railroad. As was Apex! Conversely, Level Cross got its name because its crossroads were level. No banked turns! Weird that this is the name of the place that gave us Richard Petty.

Lizard Lick (also not a town!) got its name because of a “passing observer who saw many lizards sunning and licking themselves on a rail fence.” It’s home to a towing company that became fodder for a reality show that ran on TruTV a while back and whose proprietor spends a lot of time arguing with atheists online.

Cary (Tied for 5th place)

Cary is a “town.” We’ve been over this.

Meat Camp (Tied for 5th place)

This is the first place where this list overlaps with the Rabbit Hole’s old Atlas of Best Places for an Ass-Whuppin’. Why are you all aware of Meat Camp? Spencer Hall, maybe?

If I may, I think the patient zero for all of this weird name awareness is the North Carolina Gazetteer, which was originally written as a dictionary of state place names back in 1968. It’s the go-to reference book that settles any geography question you might have about this state. It contains references to 21,000 places in North Carolina, and if there’s anyone who might want to go out and write, say, an online post about odd little towns, the Gazetteer’s the primary source for information about the origin of their names. Yes, it took you 10 seconds to go to Wikipedia to learn about the history of, way, Whynot or Loafers Glory or Casar, but it took William Powell FIFTEEN DAMN YEARS to compile all of the information for the Gazetteer. If not for this glorious and industrious man, we would never really know about Shit Britches Creek.

Others Receiving Votes

Carrboro

This very important video from 2006 is now old enough to smoke:

Cerro Gordo

It’s named this because it resembles the site of a famous battle in Mexico. Here is what that battle looked like:

Battle of Cerro Gordo (April 18, 1847) in the Mexican-American War. Hand-colored lithograph.

Those are some big mountains! Does Columbus County have any mountains! Not at all! Its highest point is 132 feet above sea level, and it is just some nondescript intersection that’s nowhere near Cerro Gordo. Anyhow, this translates to “Fat Hill,” which is a lie.

Todd

It was named after somebody with the last name Todd, but I really wish it was named after somebody with the FIRST name Todd. Why? Because Todd is cool.

Nahunta

If you drive through Wayne County, you’re pretty much guaranteed to come across an annoying number of billboards telling you to go to the Nahunta Pork Center. When I stopped in back in 2015, I found it to be exactly what you might imagine it to be: A supermarket containing nothing but pork. The guy who owns it has been the sheriff of Wayne County for the last ten years. I didn’t buy anything because I was not prepared to transport raw pork in my car for hours on end. There’s an outlet at the farmer’s market in Raleigh which may be slightly more convenient for many of you.

Also, the pork center has a Pikeville mailing address.

Scotland Neck

This town was literally invaded by blackbirds for a short time.

The birds are bad.

Faison

You know about Mt. Olive Pickles, makers of the exercise pickle. But for a while they had some nearby competition in the small town of Faison. Cates Pickles ceased to exist in 1989 when they were bought by Dean Foods, but before that they introduced themselves to America through a national TV commercial that featured their hometown. The entire message: Our pickles are great because Faison is boring as hell, so we just use all of our free time to make good pickles.

Anyhow, they’re big into strawberries now.

Denver

It used to be called Dry Pond, but back in the 1870s, people in that area thought a railroad wouldn’t come to a place called Dry Pond. So where did they turn for a name? The national zeitgeist, that’s where! Right around that time, Colorado was in the process of becoming a state, and so the local school principal thought that Denver might be an up-and-coming modern name. So they renamed the town. And do you know what happened after that? Nothing! The railroad didn’t come, the town sort of withered, and it was unincorporated in 1971. They ended up building Lake Norman nearby and now NASCAR drivers are living there.

Dallas, North Carolina is nearby, and it’s just named after a guy who was once vice president and not the same guy the other Dallas is named for.

Honolulu

Back in 2002, it snowed in Craven County, and a photographer drove to an intersection and snapped a picture of an icy road sign. That picture was picked up by the Associated Press, which then sent it around the world. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin ran it. And it was then that people there realized—wait, there’s a Honolulu, North Carolina?

A reporter in Hawaii decided to look into this other Honolulu that’s located 4,872 miles away. Selba Witherington, one of nine people who lived there at the time, told him that her husband’s grandfather got a permit in 1900 to set up a post office:

“They asked what did they want to call it, and on the spur of the moment, he said, ‘We'll just call it Honolulu,’” Witherington said.

The family has no idea why the name of a place 4,872 miles away popped into James Witherington's head more than 100 years ago. No one in the family has ever been to Hawaii, Witherington said. “They hardly ever got out of the county.”

Honolulu is about 20 miles from California (North Carolina) which, according to the article, was named for a guy who tried to take his covered wagon across the country, broke down in eastern North Carolina, and just decided to stay and call that place California. It all goes to show that it doesn’t take a lot of thought to remember some North Carolina towns. It sometimes took even less thought to name them.