Dr. Joe Sutton

An abundance of land awaited the earliest settlers who arrived in the unsettled backcountry of Bucklesberry in the early to mid-1700s. Defined by historian and author Dr. Lindley S. Butler, PhD, backcountry was a "term used during the early settlement and colonial periods for the vast interior of North Carolina, located away from the coastline and including both the modern day Piedmont and Mountain regions."

Extensive research on the backcountry was conducted by Dr. Creston S. Long, III, PhD in his 2002 doctoral dissertation titled, Southern Routes: Family Migration and the Eighteenth-Century South Backcountry. The backcountry of North Carolina was expansive and appealed to colonists who were willing to accept the challenges and risks of settling unknown territory. "For those who sought to improve their situations...or to join family in other backcountry areas," wrote Dr. Long, "heading south a hundred or so miles seemed to be a manageable risk to take.."

Unquestionably, acquisition of land was a primary motive for colonists in their exodus from the settled counties in the northeastern part of the State into the backcountry of places like Bucklesberry. Associated with better life, Dr. Long explained that a major draw was abundant, unclaimed, and unsettled land that could be purchased at once-in-a-lifetime, discounted prices:

"The widespread belief that it was easy to acquire land in North Carolina and the growing opportunities in the backcountry made the area attractive to many colonial settlers....[and] was greater than virtually anywhere else in the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. Between the late 1740s and the early 1760s, migrants entered the western portion of the colony and purchased large tracts for very little money."

Colonists had other motives for migrating inland as well. Many of the first settlers of Bucklesberry faced limited opportunities to advance their lives in the areas where they were born and reared. In the backcountry, they could join other like-minded family and friends. According to Dr. Long,

"Families often took up land near or adjacent to other relatives and associates. As they sought out land, they did their best to secure tracts that allowed them to build secure lives and maintain their networks of family and associates....When families decided to abandon their former communities, leaving behind land of varying size or no land at all, they often moved to an area where they could, to some extent, replicate their communities. To do this, families and individuals had to migrate to an area that had land enough not only to accommodate their own families, but to allow extended family and other associates to settle near them."

The social connection among the colonists who moved inland from the coast was also an important factor. They were able to bond together to establish new communities in the backcountry that were similar to their homelands. Per Dr. Long, "Throughout the North Carolina backcountry in the mid-eighteenth century, there were dozens of networks of families and relatives living close to each other....Various underlying factors pulled these groups of families together across the hundreds of miles which constituted the migration route. Chief among them were religion, culture, and ethnicity....[They] were able to replicate many of their social networks...but they were able to do so where many of them could own more land than they had before."

Colonists, then, were motivated to move inland for multiple reasons. In the backcountry, they found land aplenty, more than they could ever hope to acquire in their homelands, a conclusion Dr. Long reached in his research:

"When settlers left an area in which economic conditions were tightening and moved to an area where land was abundant....The amount of land a migrant could obtain in the backcountry dwarfed that of his former holdings. Indeed, it appears as though the question of motivation is readily answered: migrants moved on because they perceived better opportunity to advance themselves socially and economically."

Next month's article will focus on the first inhabitants of Bucklesberry. Interested readers can access a previously published Bucklesberry article titled "School's Out" at https://t.ly/xd8EC.