North Carolina’s newest Scenic Byway, a stretch of US 264, is just outside the Triangle
More than 40 years after the state opted not to destroy a creek when it built U.S. 264 through Nash County, the state Board of Transportation has added that stretch of road to the list of North Carolina’s most scenic highways.
The Turkey Creek Byway became the state’s 61st Scenic Byway on Thursday, joining the likes of Mt. Mitchell Scenic Drive, the Cape Fear Historic Byway and the Edenton-Windsor Loop. The designation covers the entire 11 miles of U.S. 264 in Nash County, from near Five County Stadium in Zebulon to the Wilson County line.
The byway is named for a creek the four-lane divided highway crosses between Bailey and Middlesex. Turkey Creek generally runs from north to south, but where it meets the highway, it jogs east for about 2,000 feet, parallel to the road.
As NCDOT prepared to build the highway, initial plans called for forcing Turkey Creek into a man-made channel lined with stone rip-rap. When designers looked at what that would do to the creek, they decided to move the road instead, creating an unusually wide median where the stream could continue to flow in its natural channel.
The area around the creek had been cleared when NCDOT bought the property. But in the last 45 years large beech trees have grown up along the creek, and the highway is mostly lined now with pine and hardwood forests, including redbuds and dogwoods that bloom in the spring.
The highway is an enjoyable drive
The push to designate a road a scenic or historic drive usually comes from a local government or civic group. But the nomination for the Turkey Creek Byway was made by NCDOT’s regional engineers office in Wilson, in large part to highlight the effort decades ago to preserve the creek.
“One of the big things they were trying to do was underscore the engineering of this particular road,” said Jeff Lackey, who supervises the scenic byway program. “It’s very much of an outlier. I don’t think there’s any median throughout the state with a water feature.”
The nomination, which was endorsed by elected boards in Bailey, Middlesex and Nash County, says this stretch of U.S. 264 “offers amazingly undisturbed scenic views of rural North Carolina and is an enjoyable section of roadway to drive.”
The scenic byways program mostly aims to highlight beautiful and culturally important landscapes. There are no special zoning or development regulations to preserve the character of the byways, though new billboards are prohibited.
There are scenic byways across the state, but none in Wake County. Triangle byways include the North Durham County Byway, which loops around rural parts of the county, portions of the Colonial Heritage Byway, which passes through Hillsborough and northern Orange County, and the U.S. 70 bypass around Clayton.
For more information about North Carolina Byways, go to www.ncdot.gov/travel-maps/traffic-travel/scenic-byways/.
This story was originally published December 5, 2019 at 2:36 PM.
