Warsaw, NC

Warsaw is a Duplin County town in the North Carolina Coastal Plain, with U.S. 117 running through the center as Pine Street. The 2020 census counted 2,733 residents. The Wilmington and Weldon Railroad reached the area in the nineteenth century, and the town’s four-block commercial district still sits along that rail corridor. Goldsboro is about thirty miles north; Wallace is about nineteen miles south. Warsaw is a place where the road map and the older rail map overlap.

The town was laid out along the railroad in 1838 and incorporated in 1855. Its historic district preserves the old street plan and a run of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century storefronts, while the Joshua James Blanchard House adds another piece of the town’s architectural story. Warsaw has also held its Veterans Day celebration since 1921, a tradition the town treats as the oldest continuous observance of its kind in the country. The result is a small railroad town with a strong calendar, an intact center, and Duplin County farmland close by.