Fairplains, NC

Fairplains is a Wilkes County CDP where the Blue Ridge foothills begin to level toward the Piedmont. The name is a piece of local geography: the community sits at the transition from mountain country to gently rolling ground. A late-nineteenth-century community called Fairplains appears in the area's historical record, near the old Mulberry Road corridor and the Baptist Home Church, established in 1880. The old Fairplains school was also used as a mission Sunday school. That gives the place a useful local read even without a traditional downtown: a foothill crossroads, an old church-and-farm landscape, and a name that tells you what the terrain is doing.