Murphy to Manteo, to scale
North Carolina is wide. From Murphy, in the far southwest corner, to Manteo on Roanoke Island is about 480 miles as the crow flies, routed here over the summit of Mount Mitchell on the way.
Scroll down and the state slides past sideways at a fixed scale: one mile is 40 pixels, the whole way. The line in the middle is you. The bar along the bottom is each county you cross, coloured by the industry that stands out there.
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One state, several economies
Crossing the state in a straight line, the economy changes about as often as the ground does. Tourism in the far west. Manufacturing almost without a break from the Blue Ridge to Randolph County, and still the biggest employer in much of the east. Health care, universities and information businesses in the Triangle. Farms selling hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the Piedmont eastward, which job counts largely miss. Real estate and rentals at the coast.
Any business that sells across North Carolina is selling into all of those at once, and its customers in Swain County and Wake County want quite different things.
| Leg | Road miles | Drive time |
|---|
Sources and method. The line runs as two straight great-circle segments, Murphy to the Mount Mitchell summit (USGS GNIS) and the summit to Manteo, sampled about once a mile. Elevations are from the USGS Elevation Point Query Service; the summit is shown at its published 6,684 feet (NC State Parks), the point sample there reads a little lower. Counties come from the Census Bureau’s cartographic county boundaries, and gaps in its land boundary mark open water. “Stands out” is the sector with the highest location quotient, its share of county jobs divided by its share of North Carolina jobs, among sectors with at least 100 jobs, from County Business Patterns 2023. County Business Patterns leaves out farm jobs themselves, so farming is undercounted everywhere on this page, and the forestry and farm services results in the east rest on about a hundred jobs per county. Farm sales are from the USDA 2022 Census of Agriculture. Drive times are free-flow estimates from the OSRM route planner between county seats near the line, not real traffic. The Piedmont to Coastal Plain marker is judged from elevation alone, not from a geological map. Heights in the profile are stretched so they can be seen. Research files: research/murphy-manteo-transect-2026-10-29. Highland Willow, 2026-10-29.
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