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Someone once said you could live your whole life and never leave the Southwest Ward. Born in a hospital, go to school, work, shop, raise a family, enjoy your leisure time, retire, and be buried here.
Southwest Ward is represented by Council Member Dan Besse.
It contains old established neighborhoods like Ardmore...the proud middle class neighborhood begun on the hills on the western edge of the city during the 1920's. It still shows the effects of being well maintained with pride and hard work and a recently nationally recognized historic district.
Homes in Atwood Acres, Salem Woods and the Ashford development show how the city has grown west since the edge of Winston-Salem was called Hanestown, a community built around the Hosiery Mill on what was then the road west to Clemmons and Mocksville. Today, many of the Hanestown residences have been converted to small businesses. The mill is now known as Sara Lee and is one of the major manufacturing facilities in Southwest Ward.
Country Club Road, with its homes on wide and deep lots and winding side streets, serves as the ward's northern boundary.
Southwest Ward is not all single family dwellings. There are many apartment complexes,
from some very new ones on Old Vineyard Road to some that have stood the test of time on Cloverdale Avenue.
Moore and Bolton Elementary schools and the west campus of Forsyth Technical Community College are in Southwest Ward.
You can't stay in Winston-Salem long without traveling South Stratford Road. It is a bustling conglomerate of retail stores and most of the over 60 restaurants that do business in Southwest Ward.
Commercial growth extends off Stratford Road onto Hanes Mall Boulevard. The opening of Interstate 40 in 1992 heralded even more development, bringing in travelers off the interstate to shop and stay the night in Winston-Salem.
Thruway Shopping Center, the Pavilions, Cloverdale Plaza and the 1.5 million square foot Hanes Mall make this area the major retail center for our city. There are other small shopping areas both new and old.
The area around Country Club Road and South Stratford Road has turned into a financial area.
There are places of peace and quiet here. Miller Park..its land donated to the City by A. Clint Miller in 1941,...offers picnic shelters, playgrounds, two ballfields, an amphitheater and wooded trails and streams. Its very busy recreation center serves over thirty thousand people per year.
Hathaway Park off Country Club Road is a mostly natural setting with picnic tables, tennis courts and ball fields.
Hanestown Park is one of the City's smallest parks. There are tennis courts, ball fields and a busy modern recreation center at Little Creek Park serving the area around Salem Woods, and a planned greenway will extend south toward Somerset Drive.
Hawthorne Road connects two medical giants, Baptist Hospital and the Wake Forest University School of Medicine on one end and the Forsyth Hospital Novant Health Center complex on the other. Along the way Hawthorne Road passes Medical Park Hospital and the Hawthorne Surgical Center and several private medical facilities. Adjoining streets contain an amazing assortment of medical buildings housing doctors of all specialities, dentists and medical suppliers. Wake Forest University Baptist Behavioral Health Center is on Old Vineyard Road...and on Westbrook Plaza are many more medical offices and businesses. So when adding the eight thousand plus at Baptist, seven thousand at Novant and all those who work in the related business it is apparent that the health care industry is Winston-Salem's largest employer. Much of it is in Southwest Ward...
Fine homes, shopping, schools, churches, restaurants, medical facilities...maybe you could spend your whole life in Southwest Ward.
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