Where Is North Carolina?
Of all the pirates to hunt the seas, Blackbeard was one of the most feared. He wore a tall fur hat and strapped six pistols to his chest. He lit matches and stuck them in his bushy beard so the smoke circled his face. The ship he sailed on was called the Queen Anne’s Revenge. It flew black flags, perhaps with skulls and crossbones on them.
Blackbeard’s real name may have been Edward Teach, but nobody knows for sure. Little is known of his early life. We do know he helped the English capture ships during Queen Anne’s War between 1702 and 1713 and became a pirate after that. By the fall of 1717, Blackbeard was raiding ships in the Atlantic Ocean around the Caribbean Islands. He had more than three hundred pirates under his command!
In 1718, Blackbeard and his pirates tried to sail their ships into an inlet (a narrow strip of water leading to the sea) on the North Carolina shore. The water wasn’t deep enough, and their ships got stuck. Some said Blackbeard ran aground on purpose to get rid of the ships and to split off from some of the pirates. He and a group of around thirty pirates abandoned the rest of the crew and took off with the loot. Legend says Blackbeard buried his treasure somewhere in the Outer Banks. None of it has ever been found.
People who live along North Carolina’s coast and visitors to the state have never stopped looking for it.
Chapter 1Welcome to North CarolinaNorth Carolina’s deep roots stretch back to its earliest people and the settlers who made it a state. The Tar Heel State is a modern state, too—its cities welcome new companies and businesses. North Carolina also has beautiful mountains and sandy beaches. No wonder it’s one of the fastest-growing states in the country!
North Carolina’s total land area is 48,624 square miles, making it the twenty-ninth largest US state. At 560 miles wide, North Carolina is the widest state east of the Mississippi River. The Atlantic Ocean forms its eastern border, and Tennessee lies to its west. Virginia is to its north. Georgia and South Carolina sit to the south.
The state has three main regions. The Coastal Plain is low, flat land in the east. This area covers about 45 percent of the state and includes the Outer Banks, a chain of barrier islands (long, narrow islands parallel to a coast). The Piedmont (say: PEED-mont) sits in the middle and takes up about 45 percent of North Carolina. This high, flat area stretches between the Coastal Plain and the Mountains. The Mountains in the west make up the third region. The Black Mountains, Blue Ridge Mountains, and Great Smoky Mountains are all found there. They’re part of the larger system of Appalachian Mountains, one of the oldest mountain ranges in the United States. Mount Mitchell, the tallest peak east of the Mississippi River, is located here. It’s 6,684 feet above sea level!
Traces of the first people to live in what is now North Carolina have been found in the Piedmont. About ten thousand years ago, Indigenous people took stone from the mountains and used it to make tools and spear tips. We don’t know what these people called themselves, but they were probably made up of many nations. One of the places where they dug and crafted stone is now known as the Hardaway Site, named after a construction company that was working on the land where the artifacts (objects made by ancient people) were discovered. More than one million Indigenous artifacts have been found there!
The descendants of these first Indigenous peoples spread throughout what is now North Carolina. They shared the Algonquian (say: al-GON-kwee-uhn) language and culture. Later, their descendants formed the Catawba, Cherokee, Creek, and many other nations. By the time the first European settlers arrived in the 1500s, about thirty Indigenous nations made their homes in North Carolina.
The English were the first non-Indigenous people to settle there. In 1587, they built a colony on Roanoke Island, off the coast. That same year, a baby named Virginia Dare was born. She was the first English baby born in the American colonies. Three years later, her grandfather sailed from England to bring supplies to Roanoke. When he arrived, he found it empty! The only clue left behind was the word CROATOAN carved into a wooden post. Some think it meant the colonists had moved to nearby Croatoan Island to join the Indigenous people who lived there, but nobody knows for sure.
In 1663, England’s King Charles II created a new province (a district or region) south of Virginia, even though Indigenous people already lived there. He called it Carolina, from the Latin word for his own name. Settlers in Carolina were allowed to attend any Christian church they wanted—something they couldn’t do in many European countries. People from England, Germany, and Switzerland flocked to the new province. Some forced enslaved African people to come with them to work on farms and as servants in homes for no pay.
In 1705, European settlers founded the first town in what would become North Carolina. They named it Bath, after an English city. Blackbeard came to Bath several years later and promised the English government that he’d stop being a pirate. He anchored a ship, the Adventure, in waters near Ocracoke Island. Blackbeard didn’t keep his promise and returned to being a pirate. The coastal colonies wanted him stopped. Two Royal Navy ships cornered the Adventure in an inlet in the Outer Banks. Blackbeard was killed. The inlet where he died became known as Teach’s Hole.
In 1712, England split Carolina into North and South Carolina. At that time, life was hard in Scotland, the northern section of Great Britain (which also included England). Many there were poor. Land was cheaper to buy in the American colonies than in Scotland, so a group called the Scots-Irish moved to North Carolina in hopes of finding a better life. (They’re called Scots-Irish because their Scottish ancestors had moved to Northern Ireland.) Starting in the 1740s, they settled in the Piedmont and in the Appalachian Mountains.
North Carolina had warm summers, mild winters, and plenty of rain, so crops could be grown for almost eight months a year. This attracted settlers from Virginia who moved south to farm. Soil in the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain was good for growing tobacco and cotton.
The Coastal Plain was also full of pine trees. Their wood and sap were turned into tar, a sticky liquid used to waterproof ships, and turpentine, burned as fuel in lamps. Some settlers farmed their own land, but others enslaved people as workers. By 1767, about forty thousand enslaved African people had been forced to live in North Carolina.
In 1776, North Carolina was the first American colony to vote for independence from England. Six to seven thousand North Carolinians joined the fight. Some were sent to help George Washington’s army in 1777. Others fought in North Carolina—five Revolutionary War battles took place there. After the United States won its independence, North Carolina became the twelfth state in 1789. That same year, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill became the first public university in the United States.
Ten years later, the state had the first gold rush in the United States. A twelve-year-old boy found a seventeen-pound gold nugget in a creek on his family’s land. Thousands began pouring into the Piedmont in search of gold. Until 1828, all the gold for the gold coins made by the US government came from the state.
These changes in the United States harmed North Carolina’s Indigenous people. In the 1830s, the US government passed a law that made the people of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole Nations leave their lands in the east and move west. US soldiers forced sixteen thousand Cherokee people from North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama to march to Oklahoma. At least four thousand died during the trip. This forced march became known as the Trail of Tears.
Some Indigenous people found ways to stay in North Carolina. The Lumbee people lived in the southeastern wetlands in areas settlers couldn’t farm, so they were able to remain on their land. Sixty families of the Cherokee Oconaluftee (say: oh-con-uh-LUF-tee) Citizen Indians had agreements with the North Carolina government that allowed them to stay. About four hundred Cherokee hid in the mountains. Others who survived the Trail of Tears later made their way back. The descendants of these groups became the Eastern Band of the Cherokee.
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