After coming to Zebulon with my parents more than 84 years ago, I found no reason to leave. This has been a growing town with a changing face, and every year brings interesting developments that make Zebulon ever more difficult to leave. Zebulon has maintained its “small town” atmosphere that is missing in so many other places where the feeling of family has been lost because of growth.

Zebulon’s current motto did not come easily. It took many years to develop. Until the early 1930s, our town never thought about having a motto. We just thought about growth. A new grocery or clothing store meant more than a new place to shop. Every new business meant an increased payroll in a country town trying to make it in eastern North Carolina.

We had no chamber of commerce. Our service clubs were the Zebulon Woman’s Club and the Rotary Club of Zebulon. We were strong on Masonry, with two white Lodges in Wakefield and Zebulon, and many blacks belonging to the Prince Hall Masons. And, then, as now, we had good churches.

Then came one of the most energetic men Zebulon ever knew — Worth Hinton — who began his day at 5 a.m by firing up the boiler of his dry cleaning establishment on South Arendell Avenue beside the Norfolk-Southern railroad.

He was a Johnston County import who loved his adopted city almost too much. Worth was elected mayor and looked at Zebulon with happy eyes. He decided that it was “The Biggest Little Town on Earth.”

Townspeople were not certain about what that meant, but they liked it, and it became Zebulon’s motto.

Administrations change, and those who followed Hinton as Zebulon’s leader placed signs at the east entrances on U.S. 64 and 264 and designated Zebulon as “The Gateway to the Piedmont.”

That description baffled even more people than did the former motto. When the Zebulon Board of Commissioners decided to splurge on two-color stationery, they went to local printers who were considered designers because they could take words scrawled on a sheet of paper and convert them into pretty good English. “Give us some nice stationery,” the printers were told.

Everything went well with the stationery design. Black was the basic color, because black print on white paper is easy to read. Red is eye-catching, so it became the second color. But what about a motto?

Neither of Zebulon’s first two mottos appealed to the printers, so they were discarded. What could replace them?

I was one of the printers. Suddenly it struck me. I had lived in Zebulon all my life. I returned after World War II. Why? I liked the place! Why? People were helpful and concerned about each other. People in Zebulon were friendly. Why not have a motto telling that Zebulon was “The Town of Friendly People”?

Thus it was that Zebulon became known officially as "The Town of Friendly People."

After almost 60 years, Zebulon’s current motto is as valid as ever. This truly is a place where friendship prevails. We have far more immigrants than natives, and no longer can I walk down Arendell Avenue and know a person’s heritage by either appearance or name. But everyone, even those “damn Yankees” who came here and don’t go back, have adopted our friendly ways.

I like our town. Don’t you? And I don’t plan to leave for another 84 years.