It sounds like you're from the Piedmont area.
I have ancestors that fought at the Battle of Kings Mountain. Their families had already migrated west over the Blue Ridge mountains by the turn of the 19th century. One of my brothers-in-law spent his high school years in Shelby. His father was an industrial engineer in the textiles industry and they moved around North & South Carolina a lot in the '60s and '70s. I've also got a good childhood friend who married a girl from Gastonia and they've lived there for about the past thirty years after we went to college in Nashville and grad school in Kansas City together. Back in the '90s I worked for a transportation company based in Fletcher, NC about ten miles south of Asheville and travelled extensively all over the Carolinas, but particularly in the areas surrounding Asheville, north and east of Rocky Mount, and Sumter. We also had a large customer base in NW South Carolina in all of those small towns that seemed to have a roller bearing or other kind of fine machining operation, from Cowpens, Fountain Inn, Belton, Honea Path, and Anderson all the way up into the foothills at Easley and Pickens.