Mailing Address:"This Remote Part of the World": The Formation of North Carolina's Lower Cape Fear Region, 1725-1775
Brad Wood, Ph.D. The Johns Hopkins University (1999), is an Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University.
"My study strives to recapture the regional character of settlement and development in the Lower Cape Fear area of North Carolina before the American Revolution. It does so not only to draw attention to the key elements of Lower Cape Fear society that made it distinctive, but, even more important, to open a window into the broader processes of regional development, into the forces that shaped life for settlers expanding into the many new regional societies of early- and mid-eighteenth-century America.
"Permanent settlement along the lower reaches of North Carolina's Cape Fear River began around 1725 and, by the American Revolution, the Lower Cape Fear had emerged as a distinct and important region in North Carolina. The early impetus for settlement in the region came from elite North and South Carolinians, most notably members of South Carolina's prominent Moore family, who sought to profit from the region's forest resources, port facilities, and rice-growing potential. The settlement that formed in this area received a relatively limited number of immigrants, but they came from a variety of places in the British Atlantic world, and attracted larger groups from both North and South Carolina. While some scholars have noted similarities between the Lower Cape Fear settlements and the South Carolina lowcountry, the society that development in this region also differed significantly from neighboring societies in both North and South Carolina. Residents of the colonial Lower Cape Fear depended heavily on neighborhood and kinship networks that were often geographically confined to the region itself.
"Though the Lower Cape Fear never developed a very significant rice-growing economy during the colonial period, naval stores and other forest industries combined with agricultural activities to bring much greater export profits to the Lower Cape Fear than to any other part of North Carolina. For these and for other reasons, Lower Cape Fear residents accumulated North Carolina's largest amounts of property in both land and slaves. By the late colonial period, slaves made up a majority of the Lower Cape Fear's still sparse population and Wilmington, while still quite small in size, served as the most important trading entrepot between Norfolk and Charleston. Consequently, by 1775, the Lower Cape Fear region differed from other areas of North Carolina in social structure; in labor and staple production routines; in transportation, trading, and urbanization patterns; in patterns of wealth; in historical development; and in numerous other ways."
~ Brad Wood
