Greenville, NC news and local guide

In its early years the Tar River was navigable, and by the 1860s several steamboat lines carried passengers and goods. Cotton was the leading crop, and Greenville became a major cotton export center, but before 1900 tobacco had overtaken cotton as the leading money crop, and the city became one of North Carolina's leading tobacco marketing and warehouse centers. For more than a century Greenville was known chiefly as a tobacco market and the home of a small state college, chartered by the legislature in March 1907 as the East Carolina Teachers Training School, a coeducational institution. By the mid-1960s East Carolina College was the third-largest state-supported college, with enrollment approaching 8,000, and in 1967 it became East Carolina University. Its medical school admitted its first four-year class in 1977, and enrollment now exceeds 29,000. The city's modern economic development began in 1963, when Empire Brush was recruited to the new Greenville Industrial Park. Sources Wikipedia: Greenville, North Carolina