Graham, North Carolina

Graham is the county seat of Alamance County, carved out of surrounding Orange County in eighteen forty-nine and named after William A. Graham, who served as governor of North Carolina from eighteen forty-five to eighteen forty-nine. Commissioners voted that same year to spend eight thousand dollars on a courthouse at the center of the new county, and the town grew up around it.

Alamance County has a particular significance in American history: it was here, in May of seventeen seventy-one, that royal Governor Tryon crushed the Regulator movement at the Battle of Alamance, a backcountry uprising against corrupt colonial taxation that some historians regard as a rehearsal for the Revolution. Graham itself is a quiet Piedmont town today, but the old courthouse square still anchors a place that has sat at the center of North Carolina's central argument, between ordinary citizens and those who governed them, for more than two hundred fifty years.