Rose Hill, North Carolina

Rose Hill in Duplin County takes its name from the wild roses that bloomed across the hillside where it was first settled in the late eighteen forties. The town grew up along the tracks of the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, which at one hundred sixty-one miles was the longest railroad in the world when it was completed in eighteen forty. By the eighteen fifties and sixties, Rose Hill was a busy shipping point for the naval stores industry: thousands of barrels of turpentine, pitch, rosin, and tar rolled out of the longleaf pine forests, onto rail cars, and south to the port of Wilmington.

The town was officially chartered in eighteen seventy-five. Today Rose Hill calls itself the Duplin Winery capital of North Carolina, the state's wine industry having moved in where the turpentine forests once stood.