Clemmons: Peter's Store and the First Yadkin Bridge

In eighteen oh two, a man named Peter Clemmons moved his wife and fourteen children down from Delaware and settled in the Piedmont foothills ten miles southwest of what would become Winston-Salem. He opened a general store at a crossroads, and the crossroads became a community that took his name.

Clemmons's store was not just a place to buy goods. In a frontier settlement without courts or newspapers, stores were the center of local information. Peter Clemmons also built the first bridge across the Yadkin River in the area, which meant that travelers, cattle drovers, and stagecoach lines all had reason to pass through his village. When stagecoach routes were established, Clemmons was on them.

The village sat quietly for a century and a half, growing slowly around that crossroads. It was incorporated in nineteen eighty-six, by which point it had become a growing suburban community. The founding family's name is all that remains of the Delaware farmer who thought fourteen children and a general store were enough to start a town.