(Bill Engvall voice) Here’s your sign:
Yes. That’s right. Prince, musician and artist, adopted a highway in North Carolina. Litter cleanup, it seems, was among his many passions.
Or, at least, that’s how it reads. Rabbit Hole reader Candace Tippett sent me the initial story idea. “An Adopt A Highway sign located on Hwy 321 north heading from Lenoir to Blowing Rock has intrigued me for years,” she wrote. “Caldwell County, NC is not the kind of place I would expect to see this tribute.” Also! I got this tip back in January 2024. So let this be a lesson to you: If you give me a really interesting story, I’ll be sure to follow up in two-and-a-half years. Sorry Candace!
Trying to find answers via Google mostly brings up news stories about a stretch of highway named after Prince in his home state of Minnesota. He didn’t seem to have any strong connection to Caldwell County, or to this state more generally. After Hurricane Floyd hit North Carolina in 1999 (seriously), Prince read about the catastrophic damage to Princeville, the first town in the United States that was founded by former enslaved people. He quietly donated $37,000 to help with the recovery. Much later, he co-wrote a song called “North Carolina,” with his former band member, Sheila J. from Greensboro (Anthony Hamilton said Prince really loved the “North Carolina sound.”). He once crashed a frat party in Raleigh in 1980.
There is one North Carolina Prince story that stands above the rest. In 1984, during his Purple Rain tour, his tour bus was rolling east down Interstate 40 on the way to Greensboro for a three-night set of concerts at the coliseum. The production was huge. It required ten tractor trailers worth of stuff, including an air cannon designed to shoot 15,000 carnations and chrysanthemums into a crowd that dutifully wore purple and black.
At some point, Prince decided he needed something. Something important enough to veer off the road for an unexpected pit stop. Someone on the bus called ahead. Did they have it? Yes, he was told. And so an hour later, that is how Prince made a surprise stop at a pet store, rolling in wearing a full length fur coat, no shirt, white pants, and purple knee boots.
The Asheville Citizen from Nov. 15, 1984.
Tony Kiss, a longtime reporter at the Citizen-Times, remembered getting the call:
The phone rang down here at the paper that day and I grabbed it. "Prince is at the Asheville Mall," an excited voice said. Right, sure. What would Prince be doing at the mall?. Then came another phone call saying the same thing. "He's in the pet store!" the second caller said. OK, that is weird, but I rang up the store and sure enough, the Purple One had just been in the Pet Luv store. He was aboard his tour bus, headed to Greensboro for a show, when came an immediate need for a toy poodle, the manager said.
An immediate need for a toy poodle!
Prince played shows across this state quite a bit over the years, but there’s no evidence that his tour bus ever rolled down the stretch of Highway 321 where his name hung underneath an Adopt-a-Highway sign. So what is it doing there, exactly?
Only one news outlet ever got to the bottom of it: The intrepid little News-Topic of Lenoir. The story made front page news in 2018!
There had been a rumor that Prince himself had attended the Patterson School for Boys in the 1970s, but it wasn’t true. Instead, the sign was sponsored by a woman from Lenoir named Jane Griffin and her friends. Griffin loved Prince. “Hearing ‘1999’ for the first time, I think I fell in love,” she told reporter Virginia Annable. “It was like my first love, first kiss, all at once.” She collected all sorts of albums and memorabilia. She could rattle off obscure Prince trivia at will, including the names of his ex-wives. When Prince stopped referring to himself by name and instead wanted to be known by a symbol, Griffin got it tattooed on her wrist. She cried when recounting his death to a reporter.
The best way she could memorialize him, she thought, was to put his name up on the side of Highway 321. The initial request was, well, unusual. “I was the NCDOT Adopt a Highway coordinator for this request,” a man wrote on a Facebook post a few years back. “Nice enthusiastic Prince fan wanted to do this after his passing. I was hesitant because of [Adopt-a-Highway] guidelines but, Roadside Environmental ok’d. She fulfilled her obligations while I was there.”
Hence, the sign went up in 2017, and for years, litter was collected in the name of Prince. “He loves the mountains, there are so many people going up and down the mountain, all appreciating him,” Griffin said in 2018. “I think it helps people remember.”
Well, about that. The sign last appeared on Google Street View in July 2024. Today, the actual Adopt-a-Highway sign is still there, but the Prince placard below it is gone. Turns out, too many people wanted their own personal remembrance of Prince. “Unfortunately, the sign was stolen so many times over the years that it became cost prohibitive to maintain it,” says Chrissy Murphy, a regional communications officer with the North Carolina Department of Transportation. The sign was removed for the last time in spring 2025. “We worked with the person who adopted the highway to find an alternative, and they ended up identifying another stretch of road and a close family member they wanted to honor instead.”
Meaning: That stretch of Highway 321 is available if you’d like to honor, you know, Tony Hawk or whatever. But also: Even tributes don’t last forever. It’s now been ten years since Prince died at the age of 57. The big and small impacts he left behind are still with us (as are a ton of Prince tribute bands), but the overt memorials are starting to fall away. In other words: This is just what it sounds like when doves cry.