Valdese, The Waldensian Colony

Valdese, in the foothills of Burke County, is one of the most unusual origin stories in North Carolina. In May of eighteen ninety-three, twenty-nine immigrants arrived from the Cottian Alps along the Italy-France border. They were Waldensians, a Christian sect founded in the twelve hundreds by a merchant named Peter Waldo who rejected Church hierarchy and was persecuted for centuries.

Their Alpine homeland had grown too small for the community, and a group of American investors helped them purchase roughly ten thousand acres in the North Carolina piedmont for twenty-five thousand dollars. They named the settlement Valdese, from their homeland valleys, built a hosiery mill in nineteen oh one, and incorporated as a town in nineteen twenty. Their annual outdoor drama, From This Day Forward, has told the story of that crossing every summer since nineteen sixty-eight.