Original Site of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts
Winston-Salem, Forsyth County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
Commemorating the Original Krispy Kreme Doughnut Shop Founded by Vernon Rudolph July13, 1937 534 South Main Street Winston-Salem, NC Dedicated July 2012
The Story
In the summer of 1937, Vernon Rudolph rented a building on South Main Street in Winston-Salem and began selling hot glazed doughnuts to local grocery stores — and soon, drawn by the smell, to passersby who knocked on the back door. That modest Depression-era storefront grew into Krispy Kreme, one of the most recognizable names in American baking. Winston-Salem, already a tobacco-and-textile boomtown, gave the company its first home and its enduring identity.
Why it matters
It marks the birthplace of an iconic American brand and a small-scale example of the entrepreneurial spirit that turned a single Southern storefront into a nationwide institution.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Vernon Rudolph
Related events
- · Founding of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts (1937)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Washington Street Historic District
High Point, NC
Laid out and named in 1850, Washington Street grew into the beating heart of High Point's African American community. Through the long decades of segregation, its blocks filled with Black-owned businesses, churches, doctors' offices, theaters, and gathering places—a self-sustaining commercial and cultural district built when Jim Crow shut Black residents out of the white downtown. By 1960 it stretched across a broad swath of the city, a point of pride and independence forged in the face of discrimination.
Rorer Hall
Roanoke, VA
In 1878, merchant and developer Ferdinand Rorer raised a two-story wooden building on this corner that locals dubbed "The Opera House." For a decade it served as the beating heart of community life, hosting civic gatherings and entertainment while also sheltering the municipal offices of the brand-new City of Roanoke. The hall's working life ran until 1888, just as the railroad boomtown was rapidly transforming from a small junction into a bustling Virginia city.
Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio Railroad Depot
Roanoke, VA
In 1874, a small Virginia tobacco town called Big Lick chartered itself in a tidy half-mile square radiating out from a single point near the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio Railroad Depot. The railroad was the town's lifeline, and its arrival soon set the stage for explosive growth. Within a decade Big Lick had reinvented itself as Roanoke, a booming rail junction nicknamed the "Magic City" for the speed of its rise.
John L. Hurt, Jr. Monument
Hurt, VA
This monument honors John L. Hurt, Jr. (1887–1964), the namesake of the small town of Hurt in Pittsylvania County, in Virginia's Southside tobacco and manufacturing country. Remembered as a man of "bold determination and enterprising spirit," Hurt belonged to the generation of local boosters and businessmen who shaped the fortunes of rural Virginia communities in the early twentieth century. The tribute was donated by W. Earl Allen, a gesture preserving the memory of a figure central to the town's identity.