China Grove: Song, Mail, and Chinaberry Trees

The name comes from a grove of chinaberry trees that once shaded the railroad depot. Settlers had been calling the place Savits Mill, then Lutherville, before the chinaberry name stuck in eighteen forty-nine. The town received a state charter in eighteen eighty-nine.

A few years later, China Grove made a quiet entry into postal history as the first community in North Carolina to receive Rural Free Mail Delivery, in eighteen ninety-six, bringing mail directly to farm doors instead of requiring a trip to town. Much later, in nineteen seventy-three, the Doobie Brothers released a song called China Grove. Songwriter Tom Johnston had almost certainly seen the name somewhere on the highway years earlier and filed it away without knowing it was a real place.

When a cab driver finally told him, he said he realized the name must have surfaced from somewhere in his memory.