Statesville: Fourth Creek to County Seat

Statesville began as a Presbyterian settlement called Fourth Creek Congregation, named because it sat along the fourth creek west of Salisbury. Scots-Irish immigrants traveling down from Pennsylvania arrived here in seventeen fifty-three, building a log cabin that served as both church and community anchor. When the North Carolina legislature carved Iredell County out of Rowan County in seventeen eighty-eight, naming it for James Iredell, the first associate justice of the United States Supreme Court under George Washington, the new county needed a seat.

Legislators chose Fourth Creek the following year, and the settlement was renamed Statesville. The town sits almost exactly on Interstate Seventy-Seven today, which made it a crossroads in the colonial era for the same geographical reasons it became one in the interstate era. The congregation that began in that log cabin worships on in the center of town as First Presbyterian Church.