Mayodan is a small river town in Rockingham County, NC, with a name found nowhere else on earth. Coined from the two rivers that meet just south of town — the Mayo and the Dan — the name “Mayodan” is documented in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! as the only town in the world to carry it.
The town was born from cotton. In 1895, Winston-Salem industrialist and railroad magnate Francis Fries — of the same Moravian family that helped shape Salem — purchased land along the west bank of the Mayo River and built the Mayo Mills, laying out a planned company town around it. The mill began spinning cotton in 1896, and Mayodan was formally incorporated the following year.
For most of a century, the mill was the town. It grew through several names — Mayo Mills, then Washington Mills, and finally Tultex — and at its 1950s peak employed around 1,500 people in a town of only 3,000. One vivid chapter came in 1911, when the nearby Avalon Mill burned down: rather than rebuild, the owners moved entire mill houses to Mayodan by hitching them to horses and rolling them on logs. The Mayodan plant finally closed in 1999.
Today Mayodan is reinventing itself as an outdoor-recreation destination, and the rivers that built it are the draw. Mayo River State Park — one of North Carolina’s newer state parks — offers hiking, fishing, and multiple river accesses onto the Mayo’s Class II rapids. There’s a lovely piece of history hidden in the park, too: its picnic shelter was designed by Antonin Raymond, a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright, back when the land served as the Washington Mills company park.
Mayodan’s small downtown has come along with the outdoor revival. It’s home to a couple of great restaurants and one of our favorite outfitter stores — reason enough for a stop if you like getting outside. We’ve enjoyed exploring the town and its riverside surroundings; check out some of what we got up to below.
Photos of Downtown Mayodan
Things to do in Mayodan
Resources
Visit Rockingham County Website