Cross Creek and the Birth of a Town

You are standing near the heart of what was once called Cross Creek, a place that did not start as a city at all, but as a gristmill on a narrow tributary of the Cape Fear River.

In the middle of the seventeen hundreds, a millwright named John Newberry built that mill here, at the crossing where the north-south and Yadkin roads met. He was a millwright by trade, practical and businesslike, and he saw what the river could do. Within a few years, Newberry was selling lots. Streets were being laid out. Merchants, innkeepers, tailors, shoemakers, and a sawmill operator were moving in.

At roughly the same time, just a mile downriver, the colonial assembly was establishing a separate settlement called Campbellton, named for a Scottish family that held land nearby. For a generation, two towns competed for the same commerce on the same river. Cross Creek had the gristmill trade and the inland roads. Campbellton had the courthouse.

The two towns were drawn together, and in seventeen eighty-three they were incorporated as one and named in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French nobleman who had helped the colonies win their revolution.

The name Fayetteville stuck. The mill stream that gave Cross Creek its name still runs beneath these streets, channeled underground now, but present. The roads that once carried flatboats of tar and turpentine to Wilmington shaped the avenues you are driving on today.

This is a city that began not with a governor's order or a land grant, but with one practical man who saw that a mill, on a creek, at a crossroads, was enough of a beginning.