A Really Big Book

Emily gave her dad an Amazon gift card for his birthday/Father's Day.  He used it to buy a book, a really big book, Encyclopedia of North Carolina. It is 1,314 pages of random facts about North Carolina.  He loves it.  He keeps it on the table beside his chair and regularly shares interesting North Carolina trivia with us.  A lot of his sentences now begin with, "Listen to this ..."

So, listen to this:

Wampus is the name of a semimythical creature believed to inhabit Iredell County and adjacent counties.

North Carolina reportedly has the highest incidence of kidney stones in the nation.

Saluda Grade is the steepest standard-gauge main line railway grade in the United States.  

Scuppernong Grape was named the state fruit of North Carolina in 2001.

Tweetsie Railroad, the central attraction of a "Wild West" theme park in Watauga County, dates back to 1866, when the Tennessee legislature granted the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina Railroad permission to construct a 34-mile line through the rugged Blue Ridge chain from Johnson City, TN to the iron mines in Cranberry, SC.  

Wilmington-born Anna Mathilda McNeill Whistler was the mother of artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler and the subject of his most famous painting.

Windmills were so common along the North Carolina coast at the time of the Civil War that Charles F. Johnson, a Union soldier stationed on Hatteras Island, wrote that there were "a greater number than I supposed were in existence in the whole country."