Moore's Creek Bridge: The Revolution Comes to North Carolina

On February twenty-seventh, seventeen seventy-six, a small battle about five miles southwest of this marker changed the course of the American Revolution in the South. A force of Patriot militia waited at Moore's Creek Bridge for a column of Loyalist troops, mostly Highland Scots who had answered the exiled royal governor's call to march on the coast. The Patriots had removed the bridge's planks and greased its beams, then dug in with artillery.

When the Loyalists charged, they were cut down in minutes. About eight hundred fifty Loyalists were captured in the days that followed. The victory shattered British plans to use North Carolina as a base of operations and emboldened the colonial congress to authorize its delegates to vote for independence two months later, making North Carolina the first colony to do so.

A national battlefield preserving the site lies five miles to the southwest.