Lexington: The Barbecue Capital of North Carolina

The town was named Lexington in honor of the first battle of the American Revolution, fought in seventeen seventy-five, and incorporated as the seat of Davidson County in the eighteen twenties. For its first century it was a quiet Piedmont county seat with no particular culinary reputation.

That changed in nineteen nineteen when a man named Sid Weaver opened a barbecue stand at the Davidson County Fair. He was cooking pork shoulders over hickory wood, finishing them with a sauce that had a little tomato in it, which made his version distinct from the vinegar-only style of eastern North Carolina. The idea caught on. Today the town of about twenty thousand people is home to more than a dozen barbecue restaurants, giving it more barbecue joints per capita than almost any place in the country. The Lexington Barbecue Festival, held each October, draws more than one hundred thousand visitors. From a county fair stand in nineteen nineteen, Lexington built an identity that has outlasted every other claim to fame.