Jamestown, North Carolina: Quakers, Mills, and North Carolina's First Medical School

Quaker families came here from Pennsylvania looking for good farmland, and James Mendenhall arrived in seventeen fifty-two. He later moved on to Georgia, but his son George stayed, built grist and lumber mills, and in eighteen sixteen formally founded a village and named it after his father.

For a small settlement Jamestown punched well above its weight. It is remembered for a Quaker school for children and for what is believed to have been North Carolina's first medical school, which met in the home of Doctor Madison Lindsay. The Mendenhall Homeplace still stands as a historic site, and there's an added layer: the Mendenhalls were abolitionists who used their position in the community, and likely these very roads, to move freedom-seekers north along what became the Underground Railroad.