Thousands of people fill the lawn of the Page-Walker Arts & History Center in downtown Cary for the Lazy Daze Arts and Crafts Festival. The event tends to fall on the hottest days of the year, and as festivalgoers find shade in booths, they might spot Jerry Miller in a straw hat, waving from a John Deere Gator.

In the late 1970s, Miller proposed a festival to foster a sense of community in his fast-growing city and to bring an art show to the area. As an in-demand artist himself, the last weekend in August was the only time when he wasn’t traveling to shows. “[The heat] sure didn’t kill the crowd,” Miller, now 92, says with a chuckle.

At 92-years old, Jerry Miller has dedicated his adult life to creating beautiful art and using it to entice people to visit Cary.  photograph by Charles Harris

In the weeks leading up to the first event in 1977, Miller; his wife, Jean; and their son, J, combed through hundreds of artist applications. Miller tasked his eldest daughter, Julie, just 12 at the time, with drawing the logo: a barefoot man slumped beneath a tree with a dog napping by his side.

Around 5 o’clock on the morning of the festival, Miller hung hand-painted plywood signs on every highway exit into town. Hundreds of people came. Many were shocked by the event’s success, but they shouldn’t have been. Miller’s first calling is art, but his second is bringing people to Cary.

• • •

Like many of his neighbors, Miller is not from Cary. He was born in Sanford in 1932, the 11th of 12 children. He spent his childhood drawing airplanes in his schoolbooks and sneaking into the San-Lee Theater to watch cowboy movies while avoiding the ticket taker.

After a short stint spent playing football at Elon College, Miller was drafted and sent to Fulda, Germany, where he served in the 14th Armored Cavalry. He traveled across Germany, competing as a boxer and football player on the Army’s teams.

Miller traveled around the state, drawing the sights that best represented North Carolina, like the fountain in downtown Cary’s Frantz Square. illustration by Jerry Miller

As a boy who had never left central North Carolina, he was enthralled by the sights, but it broke his heart to see the destruction that came with war. “We would drive a tank down to some of these villages, and some of the guys driving would crash into the porches and front steps because the streets were so narrow,” Miller says. “That made me mad as everything.”

In 1955, he came home, where “my sweetheart was waiting for me,” he says, smiling at Jean, his wife of 69 years. The couple moved to Raleigh while he was studying architecture at NC State’s School of Design, though they often drove to Sanford for home-cooked meals. One day, tired of sitting in traffic, Miller told Jean, “I think it’d be better if we just look for a house in Cary.”

• • •

At the time, Cary was a small village of barely 1,800 people. The Millers found a tiny house on Gray Street for $11,000 and phoned the real estate agent from the town’s then-new pharmacy, Ashworth Drugs.

After graduation, Miller began his own architecture firm, Jerry Miller Associates, which became the largest home designer in the Carolinas. He built a split-level house in the new Greenwood Forest community for his growing family, which by then included two daughters, Julie and Jill.

Duke Chapel was another of Miller’s inspirations. illustration by Jerry Miller

He had an office, but for Miller, work didn’t end when he came home. “I never did get tired of drawing,” he says. Every night, he’d join his family and finish the day’s sketches. “When we were little,” Jill remembers, “he would let us draw worms and stuff in the grass.”

Business boomed in the 1960s and early ’70s, and Cary’s population swelled to more than 20,000 by the ’80s. These people needed houses, and Miller built many of them. But a recession slowed the market, and his firm took a hit. “We had already gotten used to eating three meals a day and wearing shoes,” Miller jokes. “I thought I better turn around in my seat and start drawing something people will buy.”

Miller did what he did best, drawing houses and recognizable buildings like college campuses and historic structures. Nearly every weekend, he packed up his sketches and his family and drove to different art and craft shows across the South.

Miller was an expert at capturing iconic symbols from around the state, such as the Old Well at UNC Chapel Hill.  illustration by Jerry Miller

People were drawn to his work. Miller captured places in their perfect state: the Old Well at UNC Chapel Hill, with the shadow of a white oak over its domed roof; Cape Hatteras Lighthouse overlooking calm waters and circling seagulls; Sanford’s Temple Theatre as it looked in 1939, with a marquee advertising Gone With the Wind.

Although the drawings became regional hits, Miller craved a project closer to home. He and his neighbor, a writer named Thomas M. Byrd, self-published an illustrated guide called Around and About Cary in December 1970. The little paperback sold out multiple times, and the pair released an updated version in 1994.

“That was the greatest thing I did for the town of Cary at that time,” Miller says of the book, “because that led to everything else.”

• • •

Since 1977, the festival has grown every year. Miller’s plywood billboards served it well into the ’80s, but the event kept getting bigger and needed more extensive advertising. By the ’90s, the Lazy Daze Arts and Crafts Festival had become so popular that it hosted some 500 artists.

Outside of the success of his festival, Miller fared pretty well for himself. In 1986, he painted a watercolor of NC State’s bell tower for President Ronald Reagan. Soon after, he painted a watercolor of Duke University Chapel for President George H.W. Bush, and drew a piece for President Jimmy Carter, too.

Beyond the Triangle area, Miller found on the coast, like on Hatteras Island.  illustration by Jerry Miller

In 2022, Miller, his family, and friends gathered downtown on the lawn of the Page-Walker Arts & History Center, where he was honored with a bronze bust. They were joined by Cary council members, the mayor, and Sanford Mayor Chet Mann, Miller’s great-nephew, all of whom praised Miller’s prolific career and all that he has done for Cary.

Today, the Millers live at The Templeton of Cary, where some of the artist’s largest works — including a painting of the home of Dr. Templeton, one of Cary’s first physicians — hang in the lobby. Arthritis now stiffens Miller’s hands. But he’s still a member of the Cary Rotary Club. And he’ll never miss a Lazy Daze Festival — who else would hand out the Jerry Miller Artist Awards? With pen and ink, Miller put Cary on the map, and with it the tiny town became his muse.

Lazy Daze Arts & Crafts Festival
August 24-25
Cary Town Hall Campus
316 North Academy Street
Cary, NC 27513
(919) 462-3864
facebook.com/caryartdaze

More to Explore: Join Our State at Lazy Daze! We’ll be presenting the North Carolina Award to the NC artist who receives the highest judges’ scores.