The tobacco industry was in its infancy in the years preceding the Civil War. Then came a period of great expansion, and today the industry has grown large.
Rose O'Neal Greenhow was a famous Confederate spy who gave advance notice of the movement of Federal troops toward Bull Run, and rendered many other services to the Southern cause.
Combination of harvest festival, county fair, and homely university is the annual Braswell Plantation barbecue which is the main spoke in a unique experiment in farm owner-tenant relations.
The murder of Laura Foster was supposed to be a very secret affair, but a mountain poet, Thomas C. Land, wrote a song about it, and people in North Carolina and Virginia have been singing about it ever since.