The roads to the Final Four are actually in Gastonia
This article was published in The Charlotte Ledger e-newsletter on March 30, 2022. Find out more and sign up for free here.
A Gaston County industrial park has the only intersection of Tar Heel and Blue Devil streets; wooden pallets, tractor-trailers and a company that starts with ‘Champion’
An old industrial park south of Gastonia doesn’t look like much: stacks of wooden pallets, metal buildings, cracked pavement and rows of truck trailers.
But this week, especially, this home of plastics companies and machine shops is taking on a new significance: It’s where two streets named Blue Devil Drive and Tarheel Drive intersect.
Rivals Duke and UNC play in the Final Four on Saturday in New Orleans, in perhaps their most consequential basketball game of all time: The winner heads to the national championship game and gets bragging rights for years.
In Gaston County, near the South Carolina line, the Blue Devil and Tarheel streets have been around apparently since the early 1980s, when the industrial park opened. At the intersection itself are the buildings of two companies, C.L. Rabb Corrugated and Champion Thread. The street sign lists only “Blue Devil Drive,” and it’s bent as though somebody beat it with a bat — or perhaps backed into it with a tractor-trailer.
Like everywhere else, people here hold strong opinions on their sports teams.
“I’ve always liked the Duke Blue Devils and Coach K,” said Terrell Keys, who works at C.L. Rabb. “I’m not a Tar Heel. I don’t even want to work on that street!”
One of the cardboard company’s buildings is on Tarheel Drive, but the previous owner switched the mailbox to 145 Blue Devil Drive, said maintenance supervisor Sam Whitworth. “He didn’t like the Tar Heels.”
Since this is an industrial park, there are also several N.C. State grads in the midst, including the president and plant manager of Champion Thread. The entrance to the industrial park, off U.S. 321, is named for N.C. State: Wolfpack Drive.
Sam Whitworth, maintenance supervisor with C.L. Rabb Corrugated in Gastonia, says there are a lof of basketball fans in the industrial park that has streets named for the mascots of Duke, UNC Chapel Hill and N.C. State: “We’re ACC country. We like the tournament.”
One-of-a-kind: North Carolina towns have plenty of streets with the names “Blue Devils,” “Tar Heels” and “Wolfpack.” But finding intersections where they cross each other is as rare as a Duke-Carolina game in the Final Four: There are apparently no other intersections where Blue Devil- and Tar Heel-named streets converge.
Whitworth, who was taking a smoke break in his truck on Tuesday morning, says when he’s giving directions, most people recognize the mascot street names.
“Everybody I direct in here, I tell ’em, ‘Go down one road — it’s all basketball roads,” he said. “Or you say, ‘The last industrial park before the state line,’ and they go, ‘Oh, right before the scrapyard!”
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory; Contributing photographer/videographer: Kevin Young, The 5 and 2 Project