Due to the travels of the English adventurer, Sir Walter Raleigh, North Carolina figures very early in the journals of American History. Sir Raleigh started a small colony on the Outer Banks in 1584, some twenty years before the Jamestown colony was settled in nearby Virginia.
Dare County is named after a baby girl, Virginia Dare, who was born in the Roanoke Colony in 1587. She was the first child of English ancestry to be born in the New World.
After Sir Walter Raleigh started the Roanoke colony, he went back to England. Sir Raleigh returned with supplies in 1587. In 1591, the settlers vanished. To this day, the settlement is known as "the Lost Colony."
William Bartram was a Philadelphia botanist who explored the unsettled western regions of North Carolina and nearby places from 1773 to 1777. During his travels, he sketched over 200 species of birds, recorded many varieties of plants and spent considerable time among the Creek and Cherokee Indians.
On March 15, 1781, General Cornwallis attacked a larger regiment of American troops at the town of Guilford. After a fierce battle, in which the British took heavy losses, the Americans retreated towards the west. Later the same year, General Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown, Virginia.
In 1718, Governor Charles Eden of North Carolina granted Blackbeard the Pirate amnesty and allowed him to live on Ocracoke Island. However, Blackbeard continued his piracy until the Governor of Virginia sent a small fleet to his lair and killed the notorious pirate.
