Garner is a city of 31 000 people and is a suburb of Raleigh. It is a part of the so-called Research Triangle. The Research Triangle is the common nickname for the metropolitan area in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. It is anchored by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. The nickname originated back in the 1950s with the creation of Research Triangle Park, located between the three anchor cities, which is the largest research park in the United States and home to numerous high tech companies. There are also three major research universities in the triangle - North Carolina State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  The official name of the Research Triangle is the Raleigh-Durham-Cary, North Carolina Combinded Statistical Area. There is a population of 2.1 million people in this area. 

I always wondered why North Carolina was called the Tar Heels state. The University of North Carolina uses Tar Heels as their athletic team nickname.  Apparently, when North Carolina was a British North American colony, North Carolina was an important source of the Royal Navy's stores of tar, pitch, and turpentine. Tar and pitch were used to paint the bottoms of wooden ships in order to seal the ships and to prevent shipworms from damaging the hulls. The tar was created by piling up pine logs and burning them until hot oil seeped out from the spout.  From 1720 to 1870, about 100 000 barrels of tar and pitch were shipped to England every year. After 1824, North Carolina became the leader for naval stores for the United States Navy. By the time the American Civil War started in 1861, North Carolina had more than 1600 turpentine distilleries. Walt Whitman, American essayist, poet, and journalist, gave the nickname of tarboilers  to the residents of North Carolina. North Caro...