Terra Cotta

Mill villages were once a common feature of the North Carolina landscape from Appalachia to the Eastern counties. Here in the Triad, the Pomona Company operated a pipe factory about five miles outside of downtown Greensboro. The pipe was made out of terra cotta and the village where the factory workers lived was called Terra Cotta. The factory closed down in the 1970s, and now there’s an effort to turn the village into a living history museum.

Host Frank Stasio talks about Terra Cotta with Dennis Waddell, a resident of Terra Cotta as a child and now the founder and CEO of the Terra Cotta Heritage Foundation; Benjamin Filene, the director of public history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an associate professor of history at UNC-G; June McMurray, a resident of Terra Cotta; and Erik Noble, Elizabeth Baker and Ellen Kuhn, graduate students in history at UNC-G.