RALEIGH – Everyone knows that over the past three decades, a major driver of North Carolina’s population growth has been migration across the border – the Mason-Dixon border, that is.
Large numbers of people have moved to North Carolina from places such as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. Some came to pursue economic or educational opportunities. Others retired here. Among its many effects, the influx of Northerners and Midwesterners to North Carolina has changed our state’s politics, helping to weaken what was once single-party domination by the Democrats.
But what many folks may not appreciate is that people have been moving from the likes of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania into North Carolina for centuries. In fact, many native Tar Heels are really “Yankees,” in a sense, because their ancestors came from up north.
I’m one of those. Nearly all of my ancestors were in North Carolina by the time of the American Revolution or shortly thereafter. But not all them came from other Southern states, or directly from Europe, or from local Indian cultures. Quite a few were originally Northerners.
Consider the story of Benedict Bristol.
Since the early 19th century, Bristol and his descendants have played a significant role in western North Carolina history, particularly in the area of Morganton and Burke County. His sons fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Yet he was the epitome of a Connecticut Yankee. And he was my great-great-great grandfather. In 1836 his daughter Eudocia Bristol married my great-great grandfather, James Monroe Hood, in the Burke County community of – where else? – Hoodsville.
What brought Benedict all the way from New Haven, Connecticut? It seems that he was a traveling merchant – one of those “Yankee peddlers” who carried manufactured goods, news, and perhaps a bit of gossip over the rough roads and trails of the young country. As J.R. Dolan writes in the delightful 1964 book The Yankee Peddlers of Early America, “nothing but an all-consuming desire for financial profit or an overwhelmingly thirst for adventure could possibly have made them suffer the torture of travel by land at a time when nothing we could call a road even existed.”
During the 1790s, New Haven became a center of New England’s burgeoning wagon and carriage industry. Peddlers from Connecticut and other new states began to look southward, where the cotton gin (invented by New Haven’s own Eli Whitney) had vastly expanded the production of the South’s cash crop – thus generating vastly more cash for Southerners who lived far away from the new country’s manufacturing centers up north.
It didn’t take long for would-be Yankee peddlers such as Benedict Bristol to see the opportunity for profitable trade. They bought and outfitted wagons. They loaded up a wide variety of merchandise – from Connecticut’s famous clocks and finely crafted goods to books, brooms, tools, and flatware. Then they headed off to seek their fortunes.
Around 1807, Benedict and his business partner, Andrew Tuttle, drove their wagons into Burke County and looked for a place to set up shop. Robert McCall, a Scotch-Irish immigrant and Revolutionary war veteran, was one of the largest landowners in what became the Hoodsville community of Burke County. He offered to let Benedict and Andrew use his property to vend their wares.
I don’t know how many neighbors liked what they saw among the trade goods the newcomers offered for sale on Robert McCall’s property. What I do know is that Benedict and Andrew liked what they saw among Robert McCall’s daughters. In 1809, Andrew Tuttle married Betsy McCall. In 1810, Benedict Bristol married Jennie McCall.
Benedict bought some land and began farming. One source suggests that he may also have been a schoolteacher for a while, as was his friend Andrew Tuttle. Benedict and Jennie settled down to have seven children. Then she died, perhaps out of sheer exhaustion, in 1820.
Five years later, Benedict took another wife, and once again found her among the McCall family. He married Elizabeth McCall, the daughter of Robert McCall’s son John. So Benedict’s second wife was the niece of his first wife. These things happened in the small-town North Carolina of the time.
Benedict and Elizabeth Bristol had 13 more children, including four sons who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Benedict lived more than half a century in Burke County, becoming one of his community’s biggest landowners, farmers, and political leaders. He served on the equivalent of Burke’s county commission in the 1840s, including a term as chairman of the county school board in 1843, and was active in the local Democratic Party.
Benedict Bristol, born right at the end of the Revolutionary War, lived long enough to see the end of the Civil War. He died in 1868, at the age of 87. His descendants continued to play an active role in the political and commercial life of Burke County.
His son Lambert Bristol, for example, returned from his service in the Civil War – he is reported to have been the youngest captain in the Confederacy, at age 16 – to start a family and several local businesses, including Morganton Savings and Loan. He was elected clerk of court in Burke County and served for 16 years, then twice elected the mayor of Morganton. This was particularly notable because Lambert, unlike his father Benedict, was a staunch Republican in a largely Democratic county.
Lambert’s son Benedict founded and operated the Morganton-Burke Wholesale Company in the early 20th century. He served on the boards of several local banks and savings & loans. In 1937, this younger Benedict Bristol was also elected mayor of Morganton, serving six years.
For generations, the economic, cultural, and political life of North Carolina has been enriched by travelers and settlers from afar. Many of them have been Yankees. This isn’t a modern phenomenon. It’s a Carolina tradition – centuries old, and going strong.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.