— — the four seats that did not move.
“A small city in the rolling Piedmont, between Raleigh and Charlotte. The lunch counter from the 1960 Woolworth sit-in stands a few blocks from City Hall, four stools still bolted to the floor inside the museum that took the building's place. Magnolias line South Elm Street. The dogwoods come out in April, the heat settles in by June.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Greensboro sits in the Piedmont of central North Carolina, between Raleigh and Charlotte along the I-40 and I-85 corridor, with a population of roughly 300,000. The city was named the seat of Guilford County in 1808, after the 1781 Battle of Guilford Courthouse, where Nathanael Greene's Continentals bled the British army that would later surrender at Yorktown. The campuses of UNC Greensboro and North Carolina A&T anchor the downtown grid, and the elevation runs around 270 metres above sea level.
On February 1, 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina A&T (Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond) sat at the whites-only lunch counter inside the Woolworth on South Elm Street and asked to be served. They were refused, and they stayed. By week's end the sit-in had grown to several hundred students, and within two months similar protests had reached more than fifty cities. The counter is preserved inside the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, which opened in the building in 2010.
The International Civil Rights Center & Museum at 134 South Elm Street holds the original Woolworth lunch counter and four stools, with timed entry by guided tour. Greensboro is reached most easily by Piedmont Triad International Airport, about twenty minutes west of downtown, or by Amtrak's Carolinian and Piedmont lines on the daily Raleigh-to-Charlotte run. The Guilford Courthouse National Military Park, on the north edge of the city, is free and open daily and preserves the 1781 battlefield.