North Carolina
The American Revolution in North Carolina is primarily told through battles such as King’s Mountain, Moore’s Creek Bridge and Guilford Courthouse as well as through the Halifax Resolves of April 12, 1776, which made it the first colony to authorize its delegates to vote for independence. There is another story to be told about the American Revolution in North Carolina, one of industrial enterprises that produced weapons, naval stores and textiles that aided the Revolutionary War effort.
In the months leading up to the war, North Carolina’s Provincial Congress authorized and funded several factories to produce arms and weapons. One was a gun and bayonet factory on the Black River north of Wilmington, in present-day Sampson County. Founded by Richard Herring and John Devane with a one-thousand-pound appropriation, the factory produced muskets. Herring and Devane delivered roughly one hundred muskets, several rifles, and smooth-bore guns before Loyalists destroyed the works. In Halifax, the Halifax Gun Manufactory was intended to produce weapons for the militia. Production ultimately proved unsuccessful due to higher-than-anticipated costs that slowed output. It, too, fell to the Loyalists and was destroyed in 1781.
The Provincial Congress also authorized and funded saltworks. Salt was essential to make gunpowder. Robert Williams established a solar-evaporation works at Gallant’s Point near Beaufort but went out of business by the end of 1776 due to climate issues impeding production. Richard Blackledge succeeded with a furnace-fired operation at Core Creek on the Newport River, boiling seawater in iron pans. His works supplied the colony through the war.
North Carolina’s iron ore deposits also aided the Revolutionary War effort. Substantial concentrations of iron ore were found in what are now Chatham, Lincoln and Avery Counties. In 1775, John Wilcox opened Wilcox Iron Works to cast ammunition and one-ton cannons for the Patriots at the Provincial Congress’ request. Due to a lack of skilled labor, the Wilcox Iron Works didn’t produce as much as hoped. In Surry County, entrepreneur David Allen also took advantage of the Provincial Congress’ incentives for building blast furnaces and established Allen’s Iron Works. Allen’s Iron Works produced bar iron, sawmill hardware and lead plates, and its production was deemed so vital that its workers were exempted from military draft.
Homespun – clothing made from fabric spun at home – began as colonial political resistance to and protest of the Stamp and Townshend Acts. When war severed British trade, this homespun protest became a necessity. While North Carolina grew cotton in its eastern counties, it lacked mills to weave the cotton into fabric. However, the colony recognized the critical need for a domestic supply chain in textiles to clothe and protect the warfighter, and colonial women across the Piedmont led the development of the supply chain. Spinning bees became community events where women carded, spun, and wove cloth for families and Continental troops in a Revolutionary display of “Made Local.” The Provincial Congress at Halifax along with the Daughters of Liberty organized and incentivized the production, procurement, collection and distribution of textiles for the army. The Haw River valley and what became Alamance County were active centers of textile production.
North Carolina’s maritime industries also played a critical role in the war effort at sea. By the 1770s, North Carolina produced about seventy percent of the tar and fifty percent of the turpentine exported from North America thanks to the longleaf pine forests of Eastern North Carolina. These “naval stores” caulked the wooden hulls and sealed the masts of the British Royal Navy, and the British were entirely dependent upon them. These critical naval stores were diverted to the Patriot forces by helping to maintain North Carolina’s state navy and Continental privateers’ vessels. They also became a substitute for hard currency that North Carolina was able to barter for other essential war supplies.
Mark Twain famously said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Echoes of the industries that North Carolina built to support the fight for independence can still be seen today. The naval stores and iron deposits that once supplied vital war efforts now find modern equivalents in the state’s surging participation in naval shipbuilding supply chains while the extraction of new critical minerals position it to lead in energy storage. Furthermore, North Carolina’s early reliance on homespun goods has transformed into a robust advanced textile sector, producing smart, specialized fabrics to protect and equip today’s warfighter. The past is prologue, and North Carolina’s manufacturing sector continues writing a tale that began 250 years ago.
