Benson, North Carolina

Benson sits in Johnston County, incorporated in eighteen eighty-seven after the railroad laid track through tobacco country. The town took its name from a local landowner, and within a decade it had become a curing and auction hub for flue-cured bright-leaf tobacco. Farmers from across the county hauled wagon-loads of the golden leaf into Benson's warehouse district each fall. The town today holds about four thousand residents and still hosts Mule Days each September, an annual festival celebrating the draft animals that worked Johnston County fields for more than a century.