Brunswick County: Naval Stores, Cape Fear Rice, and a Stamp Act Standoff

Brunswick County sits at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, a stretch of coast that carries more layers of colonial and revolutionary history than its quiet, marshy present suggests. The county was created in seventeen sixty-four from New Hanover and Bladen Counties, but the history here runs back to seventeen twenty-six, when Maurice Moore founded Brunswick Town as the first permanent European settlement on the lower Cape Fear.

The town's economy ran on naval stores , tar, pitch, and turpentine pressed from longleaf pine , which kept Britain's wooden-hulled fleet seaworthy. A small but significant rice trade also flowed through here; the wealthy South Carolina planters who settled the lower Cape Fear brought the tidal rice system with them in the seventeen twenties, importing enslaved Africans whose knowledge of West African wetland farming made the crop viable.

In seventeen sixty-six, Brunswick Town became the site of one of the most dramatic confrontations over the Stamp Act in all of the colonies , seven years before the Boston Tea Party. Citizens surrounded the royal governor's home, placed him under house arrest, and halted stamp tax collection in the region. It was an act of collective defiance that shut down Crown authority on the Cape Fear before the Revolution had a name.

British troops burned Brunswick Town in seventeen seventy-six in retaliation for resistance, and the town was never rebuilt. The forest grew over the ruins. During the Civil War, Confederate engineers raised Fort Anderson directly on top of the old village site, using the rubble as a foundation for earthworks. Today the colonial foundations and Confederate earthworks coexist on the same ground, layered like the history itself.