November 21, 1789 – North Carolina Joins the Union as the 12th State

North Carolina was originally known as the Province of Carolina along with what is today South Carolina. The northern and southern parts of the province separated in 1729.

Edenton served as the state capital beginning in 1722, and New Bern was selected as the capital in 1766. In 1788 Raleigh (named for Sir Walter Raleigh) was chosen as the site of the new capital, as its central location protected it from coastal attacks.

[“Blackbeard” a.k.a. Edward Teach from England, and other pirates marauded the North Carolina shoreline. He had a reputation for being bold and fearless, twisting his long black beard into tails and stuffing lit cannon fuses into his beard and under his hat. He finally met his maker in November, 1718, at Ocracoke Inlet. He was killed by ships send by the governor of Virginia and captained by Lieutenant Robert Maynard. Blackbeard and several of his crew were killed, and Maynard returned to Virginia with the surviving pirates and Blackbeard’s severed head.]

Blackbeard

Chapel Hill, North Carolina is home to the first state university in the country. The cornerstone was laid in 1793, and Old East, a two-story brick building, opened its doors to its first college student in 1795.

After 1800, cotton and tobacco became important export crops. The eastern half of the state developed a slave society based on a plantation system and slave labor. The western areas were dominated by white families, especially Scots-Irish, who operated small subsistence farms. But it was plantation owners who had the money and the political power.

On May 20, 1861, North Carolina was the last of the states to declare secession from the Union. (South Carolina had been the first state.)

With the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, the Reconstruction Era began, with one of its aims being to help freed Blacks. But white conservative Democrats [at that time the party of the conservative right] regained control of the state legislature in 1870, and thanks to Ku Klux Klan violence and terrorism at the polls, were able to suppress Black voting. More than 150 Black Americans were murdered in electoral violence in 1876, but this number was low compared to other southern states.

In 1896, Democrats passed laws to impose Jim Crow and racial segregation of public facilities. It was not enough for the whites, however.

In the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, a mob of around 2,000 white men attacked the Black-owned newspaper and neighborhood and killed between 60 and 300 Blacks. They forced most of the others to abandon their homes and community, and burned much of it to the ground. They then ran off the white Republican mayor and aldermen and installed their own people (white supremacists) in the government, in the only successful coup d’état in United States history. Newspaper coverage of this event resulted in popularizing the phrase “race riot” which has ironically acquired the connotation of Blacks being responsible for the rioting.

Mob posing by the ruins of The Daily Record, the Black-run newspaper

In 1899 the state legislature passed a new constitution, with requirements for poll taxes and literacy tests for voter registration which disfranchised most Black Americans in the state. Exclusion from voting had wide effects: it meant that Black Americans could not serve on juries or in any local office. After a decade of white supremacy, many people forgot that North Carolina had ever had thriving middle-class Black Americans. North Carolina in essence became a one-party state.

North Carolina gained national attention when, on February 1, 1960, four Black college students entered a Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat at the whites-only lunch counter, and refused to move. The next day more than 30 additional students joined in solidarity and again sat at the Woolworth whites-only lunch counter. The Greensboro sit-ins lasted from February 1, 1960 to July 25, 1960. The protests led to the Woolworth Department Store chain ending its policy of racial segregation in its stores in the South.

The four men who launched the Greensboro sit-in

Nevertheless, Black citizens had no political voice in the state until after the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed to enforce their constitutional rights. It was not until 1992 that another African American was elected as a US Representative from North Carolina.

North Carolina is known for some more pleasant developments, including the first successful flight by Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, which is in the Outer Banks. There is a Wright Brothers Museum there, or you can learn about the history of flight generally at the Carolinas Aviation Museum in Charlotte.

Wright Brothers National Memorial

Tourism is big business in the Outer Banks coastal area. You’ll also see a lot of lighthouses there. North Carolina’s Outer Banks has the nickname “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.” The North Carolina online encyclopedia explains the reason. This is where the warm waters of the northbound Gulf Stream meet the cold waters of the Arctic Current, and the entire coast is an area of shifting inlets, bays, sandbars, capes, and strong currents. Thus it represents a shipping hazard for both coastal and transatlantic vessels.

Modern underwater searching equipment has brought the current estimate of sunken vessels to the neighborhood of 2,000. Remnants of some of the lost vessels are still visible to those on shore.

The capital city of Raleigh, along with Durham and Chapel Hill, is home to the largest research park in the United States (Research Triangle Park).

The most populous municipality is Charlotte, which is the third largest banking center in the United States after New York City and San Francisco. Thus it has a Wells Fargo History Museum. In addition, Charlotte is home to the Nascar Hall of Fame.

Asheville, North Carolina is also a big draw for tourists. More literary types can tour Thomas Wolfe’s native boyhood home. He may not be able to go home again, as he wrote, but we can. . . . . The Asheville tourism site notes:

His unflattering portrayals of family and some 200 thinly disguised townspeople of Asheville (aka “Altamont”) prompted hometown scorn. Following eight years of self-imposed exile, Wolfe re-turned a hero in 1937, having boosted tourism during the Great Depression.”

But the majority of tourists in Asheville come to see “Asheville’s crown jewel,” The Biltmore Mansion. It was created in 1895 by George Washington Vanderbilt (1862 – 1914) as a retreat reminiscent of the grand castles and estates of France and Britain. Vanderbilt was an art collector and member of the prominent Vanderbilt family, which amassed a huge fortune through steamboats, railroads, and various other business enterprises. After Vanderbilt toured the great castles of France’s Loire Valley with architect Richard Morris Hunt, he was determined to have something similar.

The Biltmore Estate

The 178,926 square-foot mansion with 250-rooms still owned by George Vanderbilt’s descendants is the largest privately owned home in the United States. The house is filled with the original and very expensive furnishings, art and artifacts collected by Vanderbilt. (Today it operates as a for-profit, self-sufficient enterprise, using no state or federal funding for its operations.) It even has a winery, using about 150 acres (out of over 8,000 acres) for French-American hybrid grape vines.

If wine is not your thing, Asheville is also a mecca for craft beer lovers. Boasting more breweries per capita than any U.S. city, roughly 100 local beers can be enjoyed in Asheville, served on draft and in bottles. Asheville’s tourist board boasts: “Asheville was first named Beer City USA in 2009 and has swept the competition almost every year since.”

Infused Beer on tap at Bhramari Brewing in Asheville

And you don’t have to stay in Asheville to sample beer. According to the North Carolina Craft Brewers Guild, the entire state is host to the largest number of craft breweries in the American South, with more than 370 breweries and brewpubs.

Not into alcohol? North Carolina can help you quench your thirst with Pepsi Cola. The drink originated in New Bern, invented by Caleb Bradham, a drugstore clerk and graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A North Carolina online encyclopedia reports:

As customer demand increased, Bradham eventually devoted his energies full time to selling his beverage.  He changed its name to Pepsi-Cola (probably because the drink aided digestion much like pepsin enzyme) and incorporated the company in 1902.  With Bradham as its first president, the corporation had one of the earliest trademarks in the history of the US Patent Office and started advertising a ‘pure, food drink’ in the wake of the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), when the government determined that the company used no harmful substances.”