Belwood, NC

Belwood is a Cleveland County town with a name that replaced Black Rock in the 1880s. A post office opened in 1873, then moved to Capt. Lemuel Hoyle's land; the name Belwood, meaning beautiful woods, became official in 1882. The community's early business list tells you what kind of place it was: lumber, sash-and-blind work, blacksmithing, shoes, a sawmill, shingle mill, cotton gin, tannery, harness work, and a store.

The town incorporated in 1978 with its boundary drawn as a two-mile circle around the old school building. That school-centered detail still fits Belwood. The Belwood Academy had served the area in the 1800s, small multigrade schools once dotted the surrounding communities, and the Belwood Tomato Club, founded in 1913, gave farm families another shared institution. The old school site still gives the town's circular boundary a human center. Belwood sits in northeastern Cleveland County along the Lincoln County line, a small town whose modern charter rests on an older crossroads of woods, mills, schools, and farm work.