To: Campus Map

To: Facilities Division

To: Floor Plans

The pedestrian gateway was formerly a street for vehicular and pedestrian traffic.

The name of the gateway honors the famous Watauga Club, a group of young Raleigh professionals who pressed the legislature to establish NC State in order to break the bonds of narrow, "classical" education for the "elite" and to bring practical industrial and scientific education to the state. They urged the need for a school of industrial and mechanical arts to be combined with the agricultural college which was then being promoted by the farmers under Leonidas Polk (Polk Hall). The club still exists. Members included some of the men for whom other buildings on campus are named: William J. Peele, Josephus Daniels, Walter Hines Page, Charles W. Dabney and William Stuart Primrose. The official journal of the club was Page's State Chronicle, which later became part of the The News and Observer under Josephus Daniels.

The Watauga Club adopted its Indian name because "it suggested nothing in particular to the public, and had no particular connotations." In the intervening years, Watauga has come to represent a pioneering, forward-looking spirit.