Greenville, NC

Greenville, North Carolina — the venue in the event records, Wright Auditorium, places this entry firmly on the Tar River rather than in the better-known South Carolina namesake (a note for the registry). The town grew as a tobacco market, its warehouses once ringing with the auctioneers' chant of the bright-leaf harvest; the old tobacco district's brick survives in a repurposed downtown of galleries and restaurants, and the Town Common spreads along the riverbank where the port once worked.

Modern Greenville is East Carolina University's city. Founded in 1907 as a teachers' training school, ECU has grown into one of North Carolina's largest universities, with a medical school that made Greenville the healthcare capital of the state's east, and a School of Music whose concerts, opera productions and choral programmes anchor the region's cultural life. Wright Auditorium, the stately hall at the centre of the old campus, is the university's principal concert stage, where touring orchestras and opera companies have appeared before Pirate audiences for generations — the room documented in this archive. With its student-fuelled music clubs, its river greenway and the particular energy of a town where every fourth inhabitant is enrolled somewhere, Greenville is eastern Carolina's argument that the coastal plain has a capital of its own.