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Carolina Curious: Where did Union Cross community get its name?

PAUL GARBER/WFDD

There are three Union Cross communities in the Triad area, one each in Forsyth, Yadkin and Surry counties. Listener Robert Myers of Kernersville had a question for Carolina Curious about the origins of the one in southeastern Forsyth County: 

I have lived near Union Cross for many years, and I always wondered, where did the community get its name? I've asked many people in the community, but no one seems to know the answer.

The North Carolina Gazetteer — an index of the state's geographic features — has a history for the name of only one of those three communities. Yadkin County's Union Cross was apparently named for a Quaker Friends Meeting back in the 1880s.

So could Forsyth's name also come from a Friends Meeting place?

Not likely, according to Quaker history authorities. The Friends didn't start using the term Union Cross until the time the Yadkin community was named, decades after Forsyth's commu

Paul Garber is a Winston-Salem native and an award-winning reporter who began his journalism career with an internship at The High Point Enterprise in 1993. He has previously worked at The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The News and Record of Greensboro and the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was the newspaper's first full-time multimedia reporter. He won the statewide Media and the Law award in 2000 and has also been recognized for his business, investigative and multimedia reporting. Paul earned a BA from Wake Forest University and has a Master's of Liberal Arts degree from Johns Hopkins University and a Master's of Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Lewisville.

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