"It is perhaps the most pleasing, the most bewitching country which the continent affords." So wrote J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in the 1770s when he bestowed the eighteenth-century equivalent of a "quality-of-life" award on a Quaker community called New Garden, located in Piedmont, North Carolina, between the mountains and the sea.
Much has changed since then. New Garden grew to be part of a community called Greensboro, founded in 1808; and Greensboro grew to be part of a thriving metropolitan area called the Triad, which encompasses three major cities (Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem) and more than a million people. Greensboro evolved from a small center of government to an early 1900s textile and transportation hub, and today is emerging as one of the South's upand-coming centers for relocating businesses. Two centuries later Greensboro is still collecting accolades for its beauty and livability. In 2004 the Department of Energy (DOE) awarded Greensboro with entry into the Clean Cities Hall of Fame.