Wadesboro: Where Revolutionary Patriots Laid the Streets

Wadesboro has been the seat of Anson County since seventeen eighty-three, making it one of the older county seats in the Piedmont. It was called New Town until seventeen eighty-seven, when it was renamed for Colonel Thomas Wade, a Revolutionary War officer who helped found the settlement along with Patrick Boggan. Local tradition holds that the streets were named for Revolutionary generals such as Washington, Greene, Morgan, and Rutherford.

Anson County itself was formed in seventeen fifty from the massive colonial backcountry, named for British Admiral George Anson. The town developed as a trading and textile hub and settled into its role as a small agricultural county seat. Its downtown historic district retains a concentration of nineteenth-century commercial and residential buildings.