Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/265



WILMINGTON

"THE FREE TOWN ON THE CAPE FEAR"

JOSEPH BLOUNT CHESHIRE

North Carolina might be called the State without a city—civitas sine urbe. It has never had a capital or a metropolis, except arbitrarily and in name only. It has been a rural State, a State of planters and farmers. Its eminent lawyers, and even its physicians and merchants, have often been also its eminent farmers. The first president of the State Agricultural Society was the Chief Justice of its Supreme Court.

The physical conditions of a country predetermine the lines of its development. North Carolina's interminable length of dangerous coast-line repelled the earliest attempt at English settlement. Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition of 1585, coasting along its inhospitable sands, divined their true character, and