Kernersville: The Clockmaker's Crossroads

In seventeen fifty-six Caleb Story received a royal land grant for four hundred acres of rolling Piedmont woodland in what would become Forsyth County. Over the next half century the land passed through several hands, including an Irish tavern keeper named Dobson who ran a stage stop at what is now the intersection of Main and Mountain Streets. But the man who put his name on the place was Joseph Kerner, a German immigrant who arrived in America at sixteen to sell watches and clocks.

Kerner bought the property in eighteen seventeen, and the crossroads took his name, called Kerners Crossroads before the town was incorporated as Kernersville in eighteen seventy-three. The surrounding county had deep German and Moravian roots, part of the Wachovia Tract that Bishop August Spangenberg had secured from the Lord Proprietors in seventeen fifty-three. Today Kernersville is a Forsyth County town folded into the Piedmont Triad, its colonial tavern origin still marked in local history even as the interstate carries drivers past without a glance.

The town's best-known landmark is Korner's Folly, completed in eighteen eighty with twenty-two rooms, and it is described as home to the first private theatre in the United States. The train depot dates from eighteen seventy-three, the same year the town was incorporated, shortly after the railroad arrived. About twenty-six thousand people lived in Kernersville in twenty twenty, making it the largest suburb of Winston-Salem, and both Interstate forty and Interstate seventy-four serve the area.