Asheboro, North Carolina

Asheboro sits in the Uwharrie highlands of central North Carolina and was established in seventeen ninety-six as the seat of Randolph County. The town was named for Samuel Ashe, a Revolutionary War officer and governor of North Carolina who served from seventeen ninety-five to seventeen ninety-eight. For a century the local economy ran on furniture, hosiery, and small textile mills woven through the surrounding Piedmont. Today the city of roughly twenty-seven thousand anchors a county known more for clay and pottery than cloth, and it is home to the North Carolina Zoo, the state's official zoo, which opened in the mid nineteen seventies on more than two thousand acres of rolling Uwharrie terrain, making it one of the largest natural-habitat zoos in the world.