Raw States
North Carolina Whirligig Festival
Wilson, NC · Arts & Culture
- When
- November 7–8, 2026
- Where
- Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park · Wilson · NC
- Cost
- Not confirmed
- Status
- Confirmed from the organizer's published schedule
Built around Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, home to giant kinetic folk-art sculptures also held by the Smithsonian and the American Visionary Art Museum, this downtown Wilson festival mixes live music with local food and craft vendors among the whirligigs. It is the city's signature showcase of Simpson's internationally recognized work.
The history within reach
- North Carolina Whirligig Festivalsame spot
Built around Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park, home to giant kinetic folk-art sculptures also held by the Smithsonian and the American Visionary Art Museum, this downtown Wilson festival mixes live music with local food and craft vendors among the whirligigs.
- The whirligigs of Wilson0.2 mi
A retired machinery repairman named Vollis Simpson spent thirty years building wind-driven sculptures out of scrap steel and reflectors on his farm, some of them fifty feet tall, and kept building into his nineties.
Nine months before the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr.
Freed people settled low ground on the Tar River at the end of the Civil War, called it Freedom Hill, and in 1885 incorporated it as Princeville, the oldest town in America chartered by Black citizens.
Ava Gardner was born to tobacco sharecroppers at a crossroads called Grabtown outside Smithfield in 1922, left for a screen test at eighteen, and became one of the faces of Hollywood's golden age.