Burgaw, North Carolina

Burgaw is the county seat of Pender County, and both the town and the county carry names from people who came before European settlement. Pender County was split off from New Hanover County in eighteen seventy-five and named for William Dorsey Pender, the youngest Confederate general to reach that rank, who died at Gettysburg in eighteen sixty-three. The county seat was named for the Burgaw Indians, an indigenous people who once inhabited the region.

The town itself first took shape around eighteen fifty alongside the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad. Its official name changed three times in four years: authorized as Cowan in eighteen seventy-five, renamed Stanford in eighteen seventy-seven, and finally fixed as Burgaw in eighteen seventy-nine when the town was incorporated. The oldest surviving building in the Burgaw historic district is the mid-nineteenth century rail depot on South Dickerson Street.