Status Updates From The Tar Heel State: A Histo...

With almost as many aliases as pistols dangling from his person, Blackbeard the pirate brought his formidable flotilla of ships and miscreants to Topsail Isle, now Beaufort Inlet. Known as Edward Teach to Bostonians, and as Edward Thatch, Tach, or Thatche to Carolinians but as Blackbeard to history, he headed straight for Bath, the colony's fledgling capital.

The Tuscacora War not only ended the power of the Indians, the first Carolinians, along the coast and further inland, but it almost extinguished the idea of North Carolina as a colony itself. . . North Carolina, either as part of the original Carolina grant or as a province unto itself, had almost ceased to exist.

. . . the combination of geography, geology, and politics instead gave North Carolina a desirable chronicle of smaller, more progressive and incremental growth bonanzas and discoveries that, while may have seemed slow or even dormant in its development, today makes it the envy of others.

The sight of burning fires from small distilleries and sawmills so characterized colonial North Carolina that travelers frequently labeled the sometimes ragged and barefoot settlers who worked them as "tar heels." The name, like the substance, stuck.