Abstract:
Most of North Carolina's larger cities, such as Raleigh, Burlington, Charlotte, Concord, New Bern, and Wilmington, among others, had trolley car services for public transportation. Many municipalities started with horse drawn cars, and upgraded to electric powered conveyances as the services became available, as was the case with Asheville, which, by 1889, had the first electrified street railway system south of Richmond. The last of the street cars to operate in North Carolina, Gastonia city car Number 2 of the Piedmont and Northern, made its final trip in 1948, before being placed on permanent exhibit in a Gastonia park.