Goldsboro: Railroad Junction, Sherman's Target, and the Bomb That Almost Wasn't

Goldsboro was born at a railroad crossing and spent much of its history defined by what that crossing meant to armies.

The town grew around a railroad junction that took shape in the eighteen forties and fifties, named for Matthew Goldsborough, an engineer of the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad. By the Civil War, Goldsboro was one of the most strategically important railroad junctions in the entire Confederacy, the point where the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad met the Wilmington and Weldon line, making it a vital link connecting the Lower South to Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In the final weeks of the war, in March eighteen sixty-five, General William Tecumseh Sherman marched three Union armies to converge on Goldsboro specifically to seize that junction and cut Confederate supply lines. He succeeded, and the town surrendered as the Confederacy collapsed around it.

Seymour Johnson Air Force Base arrived in World War Two and gave Goldsboro a new strategic identity. On January twenty-fourth, nineteen sixty-one, that identity produced one of the Cold War's most frightening near-misses. A B Fifty-Two bomber from Seymour Johnson broke apart in mid-air over farmland just north of town, dropping two Mark Thirty-Nine thermonuclear weapons, each with a maximum yield of three-point-eight megatons, more than two hundred fifty times the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb.

Both weapons went through their arming sequences as they fell. Documents declassified in two thousand thirteen confirmed that one of the bombs had all but one of its safety switches triggered during descent, a single low-voltage switch stood between rural North Carolina and catastrophe. The other bomb buried itself deep in a muddy field outside the town of Faro, and some of its components remain there to this day, too deep to recover. The Air Force quietly purchased an easement on the land and prohibits drilling.

Goldsboro has carried both stories, the Civil War railroad town and the Cold War near-miss, somewhat quietly. The landscape looks ordinary. Underneath it is not.