Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Why the Name Has a Hyphen

Winston-Salem, North Carolina, almost didn’t need a hyphen. In 1850 the new county seat next door to Salem was selling lots under the name Salem too. The people who objected are the reason the city’s first half says Winston.

Salem, picked by lot

Salem came first, and it came from the Moravian Church, which bought a large tract in North Carolina in the 1750s and called it Wachovia. John Henry Clewell’s 1902 History of Wachovia says the leaders searched for a site for their central town in 1764 and 1765, and they didn’t just pick one. They put each place to the lot, leaving the answer to a drawing, and one site after another “was in turn disapproved by the lot” until a spot near the Wach was approved. “The name Salem (peace) was given by Count Zinzendorf before his death,” Clewell writes. Zinzendorf was a count born in Saxony in 1700, and Clewell says the Moravians “were and still remain profoundly grateful” to him for his spiritual guidance.

Henry Gannett, who compiled place-name origins for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, tells it a little differently. He says Salem was “so named by early settlers in the hope of peaceful security,” and adds, “A Hebrew word meaning ‘peace.’” So they agree on the meaning but not on who picked the name. Clewell’s side has more behind it. He wrote a whole book on the Moravian settlement, and Adelaide Fries, who wrote the county’s history in 1898, says the same thing: Salem got its name “as Count Zinzendorf had wished it to be named.” Gannett doesn’t say where his version came from.

The work started on January 6, 1766, Clewell says, when twelve men walked over from the older settlement of Bethabara in the cold and felled the first tree.

The county seat with no name

That’s where it gets interesting. In January 1849 the legislature split Stokes County in two and created Forsyth, and since Salem sat almost in the middle of the new county, the commissioners put the courthouse right up against it. Fries prints the court’s own minutes from June 1850. The commissioners had believed it “unnecessary to give the County Seat of Forsyth County any other name than Salem, and so sold the lots and have made deeds under that name.”

Not everyone liked that. The minutes go on to say the name Salem “has given a good deal of dissatisfaction to the people in some portions of the County.” The court proposed letting the voters pick a name, but the motion failed. So the question went to Raleigh. Col. Henry Marshall brought in a bill, and an act ratified January 15, 1851, said the county town “shall be styled and known by the name of Winston.” Fries found the new name in the county records for the first time on March 17, 1851.

Major Winston of King’s Mountain

The new name honored Maj. Joseph Winston, and Gannett agrees he was a “soldier of the Revolution.” Fries gives the details. He was born in Virginia in 1746, moved to Surry County, North Carolina, in 1766, and at the Battle of King’s Mountain in 1780 he and his men from Surry and Wilkes “led the right wing of the little army.” He later served in Congress and died near Germanton in 1815.

Two towns, one name

For the next sixty-odd years, Winston and Salem sat side by side as separate towns. Fries notes that when Winston was incorporated in 1859, its boundary on the south was simply “the town of Salem.” Then in 1913 they joined. A 1918 study of the city’s schools uses 1913 to compare teacher pay and calls it “the year Winston and Salem were consolidated,” and a 1919 encyclopedia says the two “were consolidated to form the present city in 1913.”

So if you ever wondered why a city would carry two names with a hyphen in the middle, you can read it as a short history. On one side is a Moravian word for peace. On the other is the name the county picked when it didn’t want two Salems side by side.

Sources & further reading

• John Henry Clewell, History of Wachovia in North Carolina (1902). The Wachovia tract, surveyed in 1752 and named in 1753 (pp. 9–10); the search for a site, approved “by the lot”; “The name Salem (peace) was given by Count Zinzendorf before his death” (p. 86); the first tree on January 6, 1766 (pp. 87–88); the Moravians’ gratitude to Zinzendorf (p. 304); Zinzendorf’s birth in Saxony in 1700 (p. 312).
• Adelaide L. Fries, Forsyth County (1898). Salem, “as Count Zinzendorf had wished it to be named” (p. 27); the court minutes of June 1850 on the name Salem and the failed vote; Henry Marshall’s bill and the act of January 15, 1851, naming Winston; the division of Stokes County in January 1849 (p. 53); the first use of the name on March 17, 1851; Joseph Winston’s life and King’s Mountain (pp. 69–71); Winston’s 1859 incorporation, bounded “by the town of Salem” (p. 114).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). Salem, named “in the hope of peaceful security,” a Hebrew word for “peace” (p. 272); Winston, “named for Joseph Winston, soldier of the Revolution” (p. 328).
• L. A. Williams and J. Henry Johnston, A Study of the Winston-Salem Schools (1918). Notes 1913 as “the year Winston and Salem were consolidated.”
• The American Educator (1919). Winston and Salem “were consolidated to form the present city in 1913.”
• GNIS feature 997498 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Winston-Salem, with its official name and location.