US Map / Cities / Greensboro

Greensboro Map

Greensboro sits on a low divide in the North Carolina Piedmont, high enough that no river runs through it and the city had to build its own lakes.

Where is Greensboro?

Greensboro is in north-central North Carolina, in the middle of the Piedmont between the mountains and the coastal plain. Raleigh is about 80 miles east, Charlotte roughly 90 miles southwest, and Durham some 55 miles east. Winston-Salem is only about 30 miles west and High Point about 20 miles southwest; the three together are known as the Piedmont Triad, a metropolitan area with no single dominant center. Winston-Salem is the other Triad city in the national top 100.

Greensboro at a glance

Greensboro in North Carolina

Greensboro is the seat of Guilford County and the third largest city in North Carolina, after Charlotte and Raleigh — a state with an unusually even spread of medium-sized cities rather than one dominant metropolis, as the North Carolina county map and the North Carolina state page both show. The city grew as a railroad junction: the North Carolina Railroad was routed through in the 1850s, and the crossing of rail lines here pulled in textile and tobacco manufacturing. Two national events happened on this ground — the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in 1781, which cost the British enough to push them toward Yorktown, and the 1960 lunch counter sit-in downtown.

A city on the divide

Greensboro stands at roughly 890 feet on the Piedmont plateau, and it sits almost exactly on a drainage divide. Water falling on the eastern side of the city runs into the Haw and Deep rivers and eventually the Cape Fear, reaching the Atlantic at Wilmington; water on the western side runs to the Yadkin and Pee Dee and reaches the sea in South Carolina. Being at the head of both systems means no navigable river was ever available, and the city's water supply comes instead from reservoirs it dammed on small creeks north of town, including Lake Brandt and Lake Townsend on the Reedy Fork. The Sauratown Mountains and the Blue Ridge front lie 50 to 90 miles northwest, the outer edge of the Appalachians, and the flat coastal plain begins about 60 miles east.

Cities near Greensboro

Winston-Salem and Durham are close, Raleigh and Charlotte each within a couple of hours, and Richmond is about 150 miles north in Virginia. The South Atlantic division page runs from Delaware down to Florida.