Early Life in Eastern nc using a variety of resources – print sources and online sources, research (individual or small groups) the following questions

In the late 1600s some settlers began crossing the Albemarle Sound to settle in the middle Coastal Plain, which stretches from the Albemarle Sound to present-day Duplin and Onslow Counties. By 1691 they had settled along the Pamlico River in Bath County. More settlers traveled down the coast to settle in present-day Craven County by 1703, Carteret County by 1708, and Onslow County by 1714. These settlers included people from the Albemarle, Virginia, Maryland, and New England as well as immigrants from England. Like those who settled in the Albemarle, these people hoped to profit by farming the colony’s fertile land and by trading with the Native Americans. French, German, and Swiss people also settled in the middle Coastal Plain. Many French Huguenots had settled in Virginia. But as the population in Virginia grew, land became more scarce. As a result, some Huguenots moved to Carolina. One group settled at the head of Pamlico Sound in 1690, and another settled along the Trent River around 1707 or 1708. Swiss people and Germans from the Palatinate also came to present-day North Carolina. The Swiss were fleeing religious persecution, and the Germans were fleeing war, cold winters, and poverty. In 1710, under the direction of Baron Christoph von Graffenried, the Swiss and Germans created and settled the town of New Bern and other areas near the joining of the Neuse and Trent Rivers.

The settlement of New Bern may have sparked the Tuscarora Indian War (1711–1714), in which the Tuscarora Indians were defeated. Immigration to the middle Coastal Plain increased afterward because the war reduced the threat of Indian attacks on settlers.

In the mid-1720s, the first permanent settlers arrived in the area around the lower Cape Fear River. Their arrival was due mainly to the efforts of South Carolina planter Maurice Moore and North Carolina governor George Burrington. Moore had come to North Carolina to help fight the Tuscarora Indians. He became interested in settling in the Cape Fear area and encouraged others in South Carolina to settle there as well. Burrington ignored South Carolina’s claim to land on the west bank of the Cape Fear River. Instead, he granted this land to settlers who left South Carolina to settle in NorthCarolina. The settlers from South Carolina were fleeing economic depression, high taxes, and political unrest in their colony. Other settlers came from England, Scotland, and Ireland as well as the colonies of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Some traveled on a new one-hundred-mile road between the Neuse River and the Cape Fear River. Most settlers were attracted to this region by vast amounts of unclaimed land that were available and by commercial opportunities offered by the Cape Fear River. Since the Cape Fear River was the only deep river in the Coastal Plain that emptied into the ocean, large ships could travel it to the ports of Brunswick and Wilmington. As a result, settlers could send their goods to market and could trade with other colonies and with Europe more easily. In the 1730s Welsh and Scotch-Irish began settling in the Cape Fear area. Around 1730 a group of Welsh settled along the Northeast Cape Fear River. In the mid-1730s Swiss from South Carolina and Scotch-Irish also settled in the area. The Scotch-Irish were fleeing high rents, heavy taxes, and famine in Ireland. The Swiss soon departed, but the Scotch-Irish remained on land along the Northeast Cape Fear River.

Office of Archives and History, N.C. Department of Cultural Resources

Some of the Highland Scots may have been political refugees fleeing Scotland after a failed uprising against the English. But most wished to escape the high rents, unemployment, and poverty in their country.

African Americans, most of whom were slaves, greatly added to the population of the colony. By the time North Carolina was settled, slavery had developed in Virginia and South Carolina. White Virginians and South Carolinians who immigrated to North Carolina often brought slaves with them. Slaves were also brought from abroad. Available records of slaves imported from 1749 to 1775 show that 68.6 percent came from the West Indies and 15.6 percent from Africa. 11.6 percent of slaves imported during this time came from other mainland colonies. The origin of the remaining 4.2 percent is unknown. Most slaves lived in the lower Cape Fear area, where early immigrants from South Carolina brought the plantation culture with them. Though most settlers lived on small farms, some settlers owned large tracts of land and large numbers of slaves. These plantations produced most of the colony’s rice, indigo, and exportable naval stores. The fertile land in this area and the closeness of the Cape Fear River made trade with other colonies and with Europe profitable. These factors encouraged the plantation culture here. Slaves were not as common in the Albemarle and middle Coastal Plain for a number of reasons. First, just as the Dismal Swamp and poor roads made travel and immigration by land difficult, they also made importing slaves by land difficult. Also, the dangerous Outer Banks and the absence of a deepwater port discouraged importing them by sea. Second, getting goods to market was difficult. The rivers in these areas emptied into sounds, not the ocean, and ports along the rivers were located far inland. This meant that boats required more time to reach port, to pick up or deliver cargo, and to return to the

5 ©2005 North Carolina Museum of History

Population numbers can be interesting to read about, but do they matter? They do to demographers. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition defines demography as “the statistical study of human populations especially with reference to size and density, distribution, and vital statistics.”

Bill Tillman, who serves as North Carolina’s state demographer, studies a range of data and information to estimate current population and to project (or forecast) the future population of North Carolina and its counties. His work is highlighted on the State Demographics Unit’s Web site at demog.state.nc.us, which includes links to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Tillman helps census officials collect data and review data and methods. He also uses census data regularly in his job, which helps in a lot of planning efforts and also involves understanding the stories behind the numbers.

“If you just skim the numbers, it looks like North Carolina is a fairly fast-growing state compared to the rest of the U.S.,” Tillman said. The real story, according to Tillman, is fantastic growth in some areas, but population loss and poverty in others. Areas are prospering around Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, Forsyth and Guilford counties, and Wilmington, but other areas are losing population and struggling. Especially in the northeastern part of the state, he said, it’s a totally different world.

A number drawing attention recently is the growth in the Hispanic population. “The percentage increase is what gets the attention, but the actual numbers are not huge compared to the whole,” Tillman said. “We currently have 500,000–some Hispanics, which in some states you would hardly notice. The real surprise is that we had so very few Hispanics until just a few years ago.” Money is one reason demographics—and the state demographer—matter. The state collects the sales tax that everyone pays and distributes some of it back to counties and municipalities using a population-based formula. “If Raleigh gets $200 per year per person, and you underestimate by 10,000 people, you’re talking $2 million,” Tillman said.

The same goes for the state’s gas tax, which gets parceled out to municipalities to fund roads. Tillman’s office also makes long-range population projections that factor into things like the “certificates of need” that the state awards before nursing homes can be built or hospital beds can be added. And the salaries of North Carolina clerks of court are based on county population projections.

Tillman considers population trends such as migration—using, for instance, estimates that the U.S. Census Bureau produces based on comparing income tax filing addresses—but his work also centers on statistics such as the natural aging of the population. Other numbers he might study for various projects include births, deaths, vehicle registrations, and elementary school and Medicare enrollment. He carefully watches annexation—when a city increases its physical (or geographic) boundaries, which often means adding residents. “Usually, growth happens at the fringes of the city limits, and then the city takes those areas in,” Tillman said.

Many demographic studies break people down into statistical groups based on characteristics like age, race, and gender. Some trends are relatively easy to notice. For example, the American baby boom population—those born in the years following World War II—can be noticeably tracked. That data can suggest things such as the number of people who will apply for retirement benefits at a certain time. Birth rates can be predicted fairly accurately based on the ages of the female population at a particular place and time.

Migration can be tougher to gauge or predict. “You assume the future repeats the past to a degree, but that’s not necessarily true because unusual factors can come up,” Tillman said. “There are things you can predict, such as the inflow of eighteen-year-olds into Orange County and the outflow of twenty-two-year-olds, related to UNC–Chapel Hill. In places like Onslow County, where there is a strong military presence, you expect a certain amount of military people to come and go.” Other demographers study topics such as life expectancy, death rates, or overpopulation. “We don’t have overpopulation here,” Tillman said. “If North Carolina closed its borders, because women here have fewer than two babies on average, our population would decline quickly.”

Marks on the Land We Can See: Routes of Carolina’s Earliest Explorers By Tom Magnuson

From Tar Heel Junior Historian 47:1 (fall 2007).

Petersburg, Virginia—went to live in the Appalachian Mountains with Indians, probably those we call “Cherokee.” In the year that Gabriel, likely still a teenager, lived with these people west of Asheville, he went raiding with them. He traveled north to raid the Shawnee on the Ohio River, and he traveled south to raid Spanish mission Indians in Florida. His travels, all done in one raiding season, were made on foot. Look at a map, and try to imagine walking from the Asheville area to the Ohio River and then down to northern Florida.

Explorers come in many forms with many motives for exploration. Some are just curious, and some just adventurous. Some, like young Gabriel, are ordered into the wilderness by their owners. Some are desperate to escape one thing or another. European soldiers, traders and raiders, debtors, escaped indentured servants, and escaped slaves all used Indian trade routes to find their way into the unknown parts of America and make those parts known. The first of these explorers traveled on American Indian trading paths.

Long before Europeans showed up, American Indians maintained extensive networks of trading paths. These footpaths connected neighboring villages, broadly scattered nations, and effectively the entire continent. We know this from the trade goods found in archaeological sites. For example, archaeologists have found obsidian “points” in Ohio, and the nearest obsidian (volcanic glass) is found in Idaho. And, of course, the basic foods grown by Indians in the area of North Carolina developed in modern Latin America far, far to the south. Some of these ancient pathways later gained English names and a good deal of fame. What came to be called the Great Wagon Road was once the Warriors Path, a well-known trail used by Iroquoian and Siouan raiders traveling between upstate New York (the Iroquois homeland) and Sioux lands centered on the Catawba villages near modern Charlotte. There also was the Occaneechi Path, a name given to a number of different routes leading to and from Occaneechi Island (modern Clarksville, Virginia). And the road now noted with historic markers all over North Carolina, now known as the Trading Path, existed early on. It appeared on maps as early as 1733.

Most of these named trails, though, didn’t exactly follow the original footpaths. That is

because wagons move differently than horses, and horses move differently than people. People are really quite agile when compared to horses and wagons. Horses have bad brakes, and when they go downhill, they often lose footing. So horse paths frequently differ from human paths around steep slopes. Of course, wagons have even more difficulty with slopes. Even in Roman times, road builders knew that a slope that would carry wagons could have no more than a 5 percent grade (five feet of descent for every one hundred feet of forward movement) to keep wagons from “running away.”

What few physical facts we know about the old Indian trade and war routes that European explorers of the New World regularly used, we know from traces still visible today. We know, for example, that the trails followed the “military crest” of the ridge. That is, they ran alongside, but not on, the ridge tops. That way, as a person moved along a trail, only those on one side of the ridge could see him or her. And from measuring remnants of their old trails—some of them hundreds of years old—we know that American Indians did, in fact, discipline themselves to walk heel-to-toe in single file, leaving the smallest possible marks on the ground. Apparently, the first rule of survival in prehistoric times was not to be seen.

Shortly after arriving in America, Europeans wanted to start trading with Indians in the backcountry. They hired Indian porters to carry their trade goods. Men, women, boys, and girls all served as porters, because the Indians around the South did not have draft animals like horses or mules. As soon as you were able to tote a load, you became a worker for the tribe. Indians had used porters to carry trade goods for many centuries, and a porter’s typical load was up to eighty pounds. It was the way trade was done. But, soon after Europeans established trade with tribes in the backcountry, because of economies of scale, packhorses replaced porters. Resentment about being put out of work by horses, and resistance to changing a tradition as old as portering, at least in part, contributed to the 1676 outbreak of violence known to history as Bacon’s Rebellion. After Bacon’s Rebellion, almost all cargo moved on horseback, until wagons replaced packhorses in the 1720s and 1730s. The collision between the porters and packhorse men was repeated when wagoners replaced packhorse men as the knights of the road. But that is a different story—the story of settlement, not exploration.

By 1730, settlement had come to the backcountry. The arrival of wagons tells us that the age of exploration and frontier mostly had passed into memory. We can share in the memory of those years before settlement by finding, preserving, and studying the old trade routes. Old roads, trails, and paths help us imagine times gone by. Take a look at the old roadbed shown above. Spend a moment imagining what you would have seen, heard, and smelled standing by this road two hundred years ago when it was still in use. Traders exploring for new markets and new products in the remote backcountry found and traveled along the footpaths of the people who had come before—the Indians, escaped slaves and escaped indentured servants, the curious, the desperate, the invisible first people of the frontier.

Young Gabriel Arthur saw no wagon roads when he ran through the country with his

American Indian hosts. He and the others like him, the first European travelers and explorers, saw only footpaths.

“Raiding” was a seasonal activity among hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers. With little to do between planting and harvesting, one went raiding or, maybe, trading. Raiding involved traveling to a remote enemy town and causing the enemy an injury. Raids were, in this way, casual little wars. The Iroquois people traditionally and maybe habitually warred with the Siouan people. Each raided the other, it seems, every summer season.

By Christopher E. Hendricks and J. Edwin Hendricks. From Tar Heel Junior Historian 34 (spring 1995). Images may differ from those in the original articles.

North Carolina settlers from Europe or of European descent remained mostly in the Coastal Plain Region until about forty years before the American Revolution (1775–1783). The fall line, with its waterfalls and rapids, made traveling on rivers difficult and discouraged migration into the Piedmont from the Coastal Plain. But once settlers began arriving in the Piedmont, they came in great numbers and helped make North Carolina’s population grow rapidly. The colony’s population more than doubled in the decade from 1765 to 1775.

The Piedmont stretches from the fall line westward to the edge of the Appalachian Mountains. This colonial backcountry differed from the low-lying Coastal Plain. Its limestone and clay soils supported forests and grasslands. Its swift-flowing, shallow streams and narrow rivers were not good for boat traffic, but they offered excellent sites for mills and farms. Though few roads ventured into the backcountry, two were vital to settlement of the region. The Great Indian Trading Path began in Petersburg, Virginia, and traveled southwest through the Piedmont to present-day Mecklenburg County. It had been used for centuries by Native Americans, and in the mid-1700s settlers began using it to travel into North Carolina. The second major road used by settlers was the Great Wagon Road, which stretched from Pennsylvania through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and into North Carolina.

Initially the push for European settlement of the Piedmont came from English colonists living in the east. But Piedmont rivers such as the Broad, Catawba, and Yadkin/ Pee Dee flowed south into South Carolina. That made communication and trade with the eastern part of the colony difficult and discouraged settlers from the Coastal Plain. For this reason, only a few came inland from coastal towns, and by the 1730s Piedmont North Carolina was just starting to grow. Early Piedmont settlers were primarily Scotch-Irish and German people who were descendants of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia settlers. These settlers came down the Great Wagon Road. Many left their home colonies because suitable land in those colonies had become scarce and expensive.

With very different cultures and religious beliefs, the Scotch-Irish and German groups established neighboring settlements and towns but had little contact with each other.

They came in such numbers that six new counties were created in the Piedmont between 1746 and 1763. Settlers of English descent also came into the Piedmont. Two groups concentrated in the northern part. By 1754 English Quakers had organized the New Garden Monthly Meeting. This congregation attracted settlers from several counties in the Piedmont. The other English group included settlers from central Virginia, mostly Baptist, who arrived during and after the French and Indian War (1754–1763).