Colonel Edward Buncombe

One mile north of here stood Buncombe Hall, the plantation home of Colonel Edward Buncombe, the Revolutionary War officer whose name a distant western county carries to this day. Born in seventeen forty-two, Buncombe was elected colonel of the Tyrrell County militia in seventeen seventy-five and commanded his regiment through some of the hardest campaigns of the war. At the Battle of Germantown in October seventeen seventy-seven, he was severely wounded and left for dead on the field, recognized only when a former British schoolmate found him and arranged his removal to Philadelphia.

He was paroled to British-held territory, never receiving proper medical care. He died in May of seventeen seventy-eight at thirty-five years old. When the North Carolina legislature drew a new county in the western mountains in seventeen ninety-two, they named it Buncombe, honoring a man whose courage had outlasted his life by just over a decade.