King’s South Main Street Project a reality at last

(By Leslie Bray Evans, The Stokes News) - It was in the late 1980s that the City of King first did a feasibility study for what became known as the South Main Street Project. This expansion would involve realignment of the Highway 52 bridge and the widening of South Main Street from the bridge up to Kirby Road, thus relieving traffic congestion. Making concrete plans was the next step in the late 1990s. Year after year, the State of North Carolina put a hold on the project, with the most recent postponement coming in January 2009.

Now, over a decade later, the project has at last progressed beyond the planning stages and begun moving into reality.

Getting the long-awaited project off the ground is due to stimulus money that the U.S. government is pumping into the country in hopes of jumpstarting the sluggish economy. Senator Kaye Hagan visited King in mid-February to announce that $21 million had been earmarked for this shovel-ready project.