Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Affection was mutual between Graham, N.C.
MONTREAT, N.C. — While the Rev. Billy Graham’s travels took him as far away as the Soviet Union and China, he always came back to his native North Carolina, a place of refuge, reflection and spiritual refueling.
And the most famous evangelist in American history became one of North Carolina’s favorite sons.
The highway that runs past the world headquarters of his evangelical empire in Charlotte is called Billy Graham Parkway. The chapel in the quiet mountain town of Montreat where he was married in 1943 is named in his honor. And a 2011 poll found him to be the most revered person in the state, beating out TV star Andy Griffith and University of North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith.
Graham, who died Wednesday at 99 and will be buried at his library in Charlotte on Friday, spent the final years of his life at his secluded home in Montreat, about 100 miles to the west, where, as he did even in his heyday, worked on his sermons or quietly dropped in on local church services almost unnoticed.
To the end, his family said, he saw his North Carolina heritage as an essential part of who he was.
“My father was a very humble person. He never saw himself as a celebrity. He always saw himself as a farm boy from Mecklenburg County,” the Rev. Franklin Graham said Thursday on the “Today” show.
North Carolina was the site of the beginning and the end of Graham’s earthly life, bookending trips to scores of countries to preach the gospel. Born on Nov. 7, 1918, Graham grew up on a Charlotte dairy farm that is now the site of office buildings. It was in Charlotte in 1934 that a 16-year-old Graham committed himself to Jesus at a traveling revival.
Over the years, he would return periodically for crusades, including one in 1996 before a packed crowd at the city’s football stadium.
Graham broke ground in Charlotte on the new headquarters for his Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in 2002, moving it from Minnesota, where he had once worked as a college administrator. “This move to Charlotte anchors us firmly to our roots,” he said at the time.
But it was Montreat that was home base, where he raised his five children, where his wife’s family had roots, and where the two were married in what is now Graham Chapel on the campus of Montreat College.
North Carolina took pride in being the home of “America’s Pastor.” This week video billboards along North Carolina interstates paid their respects with messages such as one showing Graham’s name against a heavenly blue sky, with a white dove.