Business View Magazine | February 2020

212 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2020 town of 30,000 people visit it. It’s been a big tourist draw, but also a quality of life amenity. This is in a park that already had a couple of miles of walking trails, so we included the new quarter-mile walking trail that will eventually connect to our downtown greenway.” Something that has already worked very successfully in Sanford, in terms of its quality of life amenities, while continuing to serve both its residents, as well as tourists, is the city’s public art initiatives, a key element of which has been the ongoing creation of large painted murals in downtown locations, depicting important scenes from Sanford’s past. All of the murals recognize an event, or people, or a business that is no longer in existence. They were paid for with private donations, a $40,000 grant from the State of North Carolina, and a matching grant from the city. The city’s first mural was the Sanford Spinners, a minor league ball team in the early 1940s; they were the Tobacco Road Champions three years in a row. Crash Davis (whose name inspired the character from the movie, Bull Durham) played for them for one season. The second mural was Herb Thomas and his Fabulous Hudson Hornet; he was instrumental in starting NASCAR and Hudson, the car in the movie, CARS, is modeled after his Hudson Hornet. Then there’s Silent Wings, for three glider pilots who flew during World War II, who were born and raised in Sanford, and made it back alive. The city also recognized two African-American pillars of the community - one was an educator, W.B. Wicker, and the other one was Link Boykin, who in the early 1900s had a brick business that, at one time, employed up to 100 brick masons. The Fairview Dairy mural is the first three dimensional mural in North Carolina; it’s 50 feet tall and about 60 feet long and situated on the building where the Fairview Dairy was, originally, although it’s no longer in existence. “Public art has worked tremendously well,” Mann