The Dividing Line: Where Virginia Ends

In March of seventeen twenty-eight, surveyors drove a cedar post into the sand at Currituck Inlet to mark the starting point of the first official boundary between Virginia and Carolina. The two colonies had argued for decades over where one ended and the other began, and the dispute had practical consequences: taxes, land titles, and legal jurisdiction all depended on which side of the line a settler stood. Virginia planter and writer William Byrd led the Virginia commission, and his account of the expedition, published later as the History of the Dividing Line, became a classic of colonial American literature.

The surveyors worked westward from this coastal point for months, covering roughly two hundred miles before halting near what is now Stokes County. Byrd's journal is full of pointed commentary about the habits and customs he encountered among the backcountry settlers, making the line not just a legal boundary but a literary one.