Legends and rumors about Confederate Treasury gold being buried in N.C.'s Piedmont continue to the present day. That any vast horde of gold was ever hidden in the state, however, is unlikely.
Before he became the nation's seventh President, Andrew Jackson fought a number of duels because of what he considered insults to his wife Rachael. Only one of the duels was fatal to his opponent, however.
Micajah Autry went to Texas in 1835 to build a new life for his family. Killed at the Alamo in 1836, the Sampson County native passed into Texas legend. A full-length portrait in the Alamo Museum is one of many objects honoring his bravery.
Born in Virginia, Nathaniel Rochester moved to Oxford in Granville County at age eleven. Active in the Revolutionary War, this multi- talented patriot was also a legislator, banker, manufacturer, and founder of the city of Rochester, New York.
Needham Bryan Cobb had a unique way to teach geography in the 19th Century. He incorporated the names of counties, creeks, sounds, and other features into poems that students then memorized from his 1887 book, POETICAL GEOGRAPHY OF NORTH CAROLINA.
Captain William H. Boudinot of Chatham County, an 1837 U.S. Naval Academy graduate, devised in 1856 a way to gather weather information for forecasting. Ignored for years, his ideas eventually laid the foundation for the weather service.
Born in a log cabin in Jackson County, Felix Ray Allen grew up to be a lawyer, judge, and author, but is most famous for composing the \"Ballad of Kidder Cole\" when he was sixteen.
The dream of its first director, J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is the largest repository of manuscript material pertaining to the South.
Miles Darden, of Northampton County, at 1,020 pounds; Lewis Lewark, of Currituck County, at 840 pounds; and Decatur Gillikin, of Currituck County (weighing only 220 pounds, but very strong) were among the state's biggest people.
Not every brandy maker can have his product extolled by a governor, but R. A. Bynum of Farmville was one. In 1879, Governor Zebulon B. Vance's statement praising the apple brandy appeared on the front page of THE RALEIGH OBSERVER.
In 1873, near Como, in Hertford County, James Henry Gatling, brother of the Gatling gun inventor, launched a flying machine. Had the motor been lighter, he might have been the first to fly.
Emeline Pigott of Morehead City not only cared for wounded and ill Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, but also spied on Union troops and delivered war supplies for the Southern cause.
While tobacco has long been the state's prime crop, sericulture, or the raising of silkworms for silk production, was a minor industry in the eastern counties for almost 200 years. The last plant, located in Greensboro, closed in the 1930s.
Mules stolen from the Union army began Ashley Horne's fortune. In 1911, frustrated by the lack of legislative funding to honor Confederate women, the Confederate veteran paid $10,000 to build a monument to Confederate women on Capitol Square in Raleigh.
Eustace and Mary Sloop passed over a big-city medical career, choosing instead to bring health care and hope to impoverished people in Avery County for 50 years. Mrs. Sloop told their story in her 1953 book MIRACLE IN THE HILLS.