Dunn, North Carolina

Dunn is the largest city in Harnett County, incorporated in eighteen eighty-seven along the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad and named for Bennett Dunn, who supervised construction of the railway there. Its location at the crossing of two rail lines made it a regional market for cotton, then tobacco. In the early twentieth century Dunn became notable as the home base of evangelist Mordecai Ham, the preacher whose Charlotte tent revival in nineteen thirty-four led a teenage Billy Graham to convert. The city holds roughly eight thousand five hundred residents today and anchors the quiet agricultural plain between Fayetteville and Raleigh.