By Richard Sullins | richard@rantn.com
With the stroke of a pen, Sanford’s Sesquicentennial Celebration has come to an official end. At a regular meeting of the city council on April 1, Mayor Rebecca Wyhof Salmon signed a proclamation that chronicled the celebratory events over the past 12 months and that also highlighted several notable events in the city’s history since its founding 150 years ago.
It was a year filled with celebrations and commemorations that many of the city’s residents who are living now may never see the likes of again. Sanford hits its next milestone, its 200th birthday, in 2074. One council member, however, wanted to keep everyone in suspense. Councilman Charles Taylor asked if he would still be around for cake and ice cream 50 years from now.
“I will if you will,” he said.
After signing the document, Salmon said, “this community has had a great opportunity to come together and celebrate our history and talk about the place our community is right now, and to be dreaming about what the next 150 years might bring us.”
Salmon talked about the wide range of happenings that have spanned the past 12 months, calling them “a labor of passion, of time, and of spirit that went into thinking about the things that make our community truly special.”
The mayor poured herself into most, if not all, of the goings-on over the past year. Being present on the streets of Sanford during the celebration, with her steady presence at one event after another, has helped create a means for the city’s Sesquicentennial activities to create new bridges within the city that will perhaps be the most of all the benefits realized over the course of the year.
Beyond the street festivals, shows, and fireworks, new opportunities to come together around a common theme or purpose have also provided residents with an opportunity to meet their mayor and city council members. This provided elected city officials with new opportunities and extended time to hear from the constituents they serve about the issues on their minds as Sanford starts the chase towards its 200th birthday.
The mayor created the city’s Sesquicentennial Committee more than a year ago and charged it with finding ways to explore Sanford’s rich history and tremendous potential as one of America’s fastest growing micropolitan cities. Bob Joyce
served as the committee’s chair, and was assisted in those tasks by Wendy Bryan of Visit Sanford, Kelli Laudate of Downtown Sanford, Kelly Miller from the city of Sanford, and Hunter Randolph representing Lee County Public Libraries on an ad hoc basis.
The committee’s purpose was to create ways to would give every resident, business, organization, and visitor the chance to participate in the city’s 150th birthday celebrations in a range of events, activities, and productions that highlighted the innovative and inclusive spirit of what has come to be known as Brick City USA. The concentration on the faces of the council members was obvious as the record of activities and events was read into the public record.
Activities during the year of commemoration were not limited to those sponsored under the auspices of the city. A number of civic and school groups joined in the fun by organizing their own sesquicentennial activities, such as the Sanford Appearance Commission’s cooperative tree program, the Lee Regional Fair’s train-themed Lego contest, a special 150th award at the Brush and Palette Club’s annual Art Show, and collaborations with the Lions Club, Kiwanis Club of Sanford, and Greenwood Elementary School.
Facts to impress your friends
Today, Sanford is North Carolina’s 34th largest city, with a population estimated now halfway through the 2020s to be just over 33,000 people. That’s about half the number of people who live in all of Lee County. But when it was legally incorporated as a town on February 11, 1874, Sanford was barely one-square mile in size with just 236 residents.
During the Revolutionary and American Civil Wars, the area’s large deposits of coal, brownstone, and brick made it a location of considerable strategic value. By the end of World War II in 1945, Sanford had become a boom town. A flood of returning soldiers and the women they’d left behind led to the creation of urban sprawl, with all the pent-up demand for the newest conveniences of home that were just coming to the marketplace. One of the two municipalities in the area – Sanford or Jonesboro – had to survive, and two years later, Jonesboro merged into Sanford in 1947.
To put still another twist on the actual beginnings of the city for those who keep up with such things, Sanford’s official incorporation as a town made it a part of Moore County initially, since Lee County itself was not created until 1908.
It wasn’t long after the time of Sanford-Jonesboro merger that the city made national news for its involvement with the very earliest sightings within the United States of unidentified flying objects, known today as unidentified aerial phenomena. Those sightings are still reported every quarter, but now there’s a different activity gaining national attention here – athletic gold.
Sanford has gained renown as two local athletes have garnered national acclaim. Former Southern Lee High School pitcher Thomas Harrington began pitching in 2025 for Major League Baseball’s Pittsburgh Pirates, and Sarah Strong, formerly of Grace Christian School, set all sorts of records as a freshman with the University of Connecticut as they returned as NCAA basketball champions this spring.
The treasures of Sanford
One of the more popular activities during this anniversary year has been the scavenger hunts for the highly collectible commemorative coins minted to not only celebrate key milestones throughout the city’s 150 years of history, but also to point to one particular moment as being perhaps the most important of them all – the crossing of railroad lines. The front-facing design of a steam locomotive engine with the number “150” calls to mind the story of how the city’s history began with the rail industry.
The Raleigh and Augusta Airline Railroad was extended in the early 1870s from the state capital to a spot where it intersected with the Western Railroad Line, and it was at this intersection that the town of Sanford grew up. There were only about 200 people who lived in that area at the time and housing was very scarce, so railroad officials erected a dwelling at the northwest corner of modern-day Hawkins Avenue and Carthage Street to provide a residence for the family of its first depot agent, W.T. Tucker.
Tucker’s wife operated a school in the house which still stands and is now considered to be the oldest house in Sanford. The city itself draws its name from Col. C.O. Sanford, a civil engineer who was involved in the layout and construction of the railroad lines and the operation of the depot building that still stands today as the oldest building within the city.
The coins were used to celebrate that history and to draw people to the downtown area during the year of celebration, and they were made available in several different ways. First, each city employee was provided with a coin. Secondly, a coin was hidden each weekend in public spaces somewhere within the city for 51 weeks of the celebration’s year, beginning on February 16, 2024. Kelly Miller, the city’s public information officer, told The Rant that the first couple of coins she placed out disappeared without being claimed (on Charlie Watson Lane and the Humber Street Parking Lot). But folks quickly caught on to the process and the remainder were found and claimed, with most people following the directions to write a post on social media about how they found their coin.
On the final weekend of the sesquicentennial observances, a second batch of 24 coins were hidden across the county on Saturday, March 1, in a grand finale to end the city’s yearlong celebration. Called the Sesqui Coin Quest, clues were posted online at 10 a.m. that day on social media sites for the City of Sanford, Downtown Sanford Inc., Visit Sanford, and on the city’s website.
But if your sleuthing skills were taking a breather last year and you didn’t get a chance to find a commemorative coin for yourself, you can still buy one for as long as they last at the Visit Sanford Welcome Center at 229 Carthage St.
Is it now considered bad taste to remember that Jonesboro lost its charter when the Local Government Commission forced the merger between the Towns of Sanford and Jonesboro? The LGC was created in 1931 and one of the things it did was remove charters from communities that could not pay to sustain themselves. Unless I am misremember, Jonesboro continued to pay its bonds through the Second World War but doing so did not leave enough money to look after the sewer plant that was located below Kendell (before there was Kendell). That’s why Sanford was allowed to keep it’s 5 board members and the State Treasurer only allowed Jonesboro to have 2. I don’t understand the whitewash. Jonesboro had defacto bankrupted itself at a time when the only thing between Jonesboro and Sanford was just the Courthouse.
Be it Fuquay-Varina, or Eden, or Sanford, it’s good to know the towns that failed and why. As long as you remember, you won’t make the same mistakes and you won’t be surprised when a small, nearby community has to be absorbed.
Jonesboro existed as a town before Sanford did. It still exists as a portion of Sanford. In the 1st half of the 20th century, Sanford grew at a much faster pace than Jonesboro did. It is not unique. Small towns all across this country are overtaken by larger neighbors over time. It’s the way of the world. Grow and consume, or stay the same and be consumed. Who knows? in 100 years, Sanford may be a suburb of Pittsboro depending of the moves made by local governments, and someone could be lamenting the lost city of Sanford.
Sanford already won that battle with Tri River.