The Highland Scots of the Cape Fear

The town that became Fayetteville was built, in no small part, by Scottish Highlanders who arrived carrying the memory of a lost war.

After the Battle of Culloden in seventeen forty-six, the English crushed the last major Highland uprising and dismantled the clan system. Land rents rose. Opportunities vanished. And a stream of Scots looked west, toward the Cape Fear Valley of North Carolina, where the governor of the colony, Gabriel Johnston, was himself a native Scotsman. Johnston offered them something remarkable: a ten-year tax exemption.

Scots had been coming even earlier, and the first large organized group arrived in seventeen thirty-nine, several hundred men, women, and children from the county of Argyll. More followed through the seventeen fifties, sixties, and seventies, settling in the longleaf pine country surrounding Cross Creek. They could make a living here. The pines produced tar, pitch, and turpentine, the materials navies needed to keep wooden ships seaworthy. These products moved down the Cape Fear River on flatboats all the way to Wilmington and onto ocean-going vessels.

The Scots built small farms, raised cattle and horses, and traded in the market town that would one day carry a French name. They named their churches and crossroads for the Scottish highlands they had left, places like Barbecue Church, and settlements that still echo in county road signs today.

When the Revolution came, many Highland Scots faced a difficult choice. Some felt bound by oaths of loyalty to the Crown. Others joined the Patriot cause, though most Highlanders stayed loyal to the Crown.

But they stayed. Their descendants shaped Cumberland County's culture, its churches, and its sense of itself as a place set apart, a community built from distance and displacement, that put down roots and held on.