Business View Magazine - April 2016 45
traits that have stood the test of time are the city’s
spirit of cooperation and its penchant for looking
ahead, even when times are tough. The last few years
of the nation’s economic downturn was not the first
time that the citizens of Hickory have pulled together
to keep from falling behind.
Hickory began in the 1850s, when Henry Robinson
built a tavern made of logs and placed it under a huge
hickory tree. The city of “Hickory Tavern” was estab-
lished in 1863, and ten years later, the name was
shortened to just plain “Hickory.” The community of
Hickory was one that always created its own way, and it
was the first for many things in North Carolina, includ-
ing the council-manager form of government, which
it adopted in 1913. Hickory was also one of the first
towns to install electric lights, which it did in 1888, and
a complete sewage system, which was built in 1904.
But perhaps Hickory’s most well-known relationship
with harder times occurred in 1944, when the Ca-
tawba Valley became the center of one of the worst
outbreaks of polio ever recorded in the U.S. When lo-
cal facilities proved inadequate to treat its victims, the
citizens of Hickory, with help from the March of Dimes,
built, equipped, staffed, and housed a children’s hos-
pital, within days of making the decision to do it. A Red
Cross official on the scene praised the project “as the
most outstanding example of cooperative effort he
has ever seen.”
There are woods that are stronger than hickory and
woods that are harder, but the combination of strength,
toughness, hardness, and stiffness found in hickory
wood is not found in any other commercial wood prod-
uct. Indeed, wood is the reason that Hickory became,
and still is, home to one of the oldest furniture man-
ufacturers in the United States. In fact, the area has
always had a thriving furniture and textile sector. By
1961 the city boasted forty-six furniture plants, eight-
nine hosiery mills, and twenty-seven other manufac-
tories.
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
Hickory, North Carolina
WHAT:
A city of 40,000
WHERE:
North central North Carolina
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