The county was formed in 1771 from parts of Rowan County and Orange County. It was named for Francis North, 1st Earl of Guildford, father of Frederick North, Lord North, British Prime Minister from 1770 to 1782. The Quaker church played a major role in the European settlement of the county, and numerous Quakers still live in the county.
On March 15, 1781, the Battle of Guilford Court House was fought in present-day Greensboro between Generals Charles Cornwallis and Nathanael Greene during the American Revolution. This battle marked a key turning point in the Revolutionary War in the South. Although General Cornwallis, the British Commander, held the field at the end of the battle, his losses were so severe that he decided to withdraw to the Carolina and Virginia coastline, where he could receive reinforcements and his battered army could be protected by the British Navy. His decision ultimately led to his defeat later in 1781 at Yorktown, Virginia, by a combined force of American and French troops and warships.
In 1779 the southern third of Guilford County became Randolph County. In 1785 the northern half of its remaining territory became Rockingham County.
Due to the large number of Quakers living in Guilford, many of the county's residents were opposed to slavery before the Civil War. The county was a stop on the famous Underground Railroad, which provided escaped slaves with a route to freedom in the North. Levi Coffin, one of the founders of the "railroad", was a Guilford County native. He is credited with personally helping over 2,000 slaves escape to freedom before the war.
In 1891, the county became home to the state's first and only publicly supported institution of higher learning for women, the State Normal and Industrial School. In 1932, the school became the Women's College of North Carolina when it joined with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and NC State University in Raleigh to form the Consolidated University of North Carolina. From the 1930's to the 1960's the Women's College was the third-largest women's university in the world. The school's name was changed a final time in 1963 when it began admitting men; it is now known as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
In 1960 Guilford County helped spark a major development in the American civil rights movement when four black students from the North Carolina A&T State University in Greensbboro started the first civil rights sit-in. Known afterwards as the Greensboro Four, the four men deliberately sat at a "whites-only" lunch counter at the Woolworth's store in downtown Greensboro and asked to be served. They were arrested, but their action led to many other college students in Greensboro - including white students from Guilford College and the Women's College - to sit at the lunch counter in a show of support. Within two months the sit-in movement spread to 54 cities in 9 states; Woolworth's eventually agreed to desegregate its lunch counters and other restaurants in Southern towns and cities followed suit. A darker racial incident in 1979 was called the Greensboro massacre. In this incident the predominantly African American Communist Workers Party (CWP) led a march protesting the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups through a black neighborhood in southeastern Greensboro. They were attacked and shot at by the Ku Klux Klan and members of the American Nazi Party, several of the Communist Party marchers were killed or wounded in the attack. The case received further national publicity when the accused shooters were found "not guilty" by an all-white jury.
The county is divided into eighteen townships: Bruce, Center Grove, Clay, Deep River, Fentress, Friendship, Gilmer, Greene, High Point, Jamestown, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Morehead, Oak Ridge, Rock Creek, Sumner, and Washington.
Towns and Cities in Guilford County
Archdale
Gibsonville
Greensboro
High Point
Jamestown
Oak Ridge
Pleasant Garden
Sedalia
Stokesdale
Summerfield
Whitsett
Adjacent Counties
Rockingham County (north)
Alamance County (east)
Randolph County (south)
Davidson County (southwest)
Forsyth County (west)
