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CRAVEN COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA

ike every other state in the United States of America, North Carolina has
a unique and an interesting history, particularly for the FOYs because
Lmany FOYs now living in America and in Texas have their roots in North
Carolina.

Today North Carolina is the leading tobacco state in the United States. It leads
the nation in cloth manufacturing and produces more wooden furniture than any
other state. Most homes in the United States today have wooden furniture that
was made in North Carolina.

North Carolina is a southern state with a long coastline on the Atlantic Ocean.
Islands, reefs, and sand bars make its shores some of the most treacherous in the
world. Cape Hatteras is known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

In the late 1400s an English explorer named JOHN CABOT explored the North
Carolina coast but not until 1584 did any one try to lay claim to that region as
a territory. In 1584 SIR WALTER RALEIGH secured a patent from
ELIZABETH, Queen of England, and dispatched a reconnaissance voyage to
collect information about the land and to find a suitable site for a settlement.

That first exploration landed in the area of what is now known as the Neuse
River where they found a fertile, pleasant land populated by several tribes of
Indians. A colony was started on Roanoke Island in 1587. Three years later,
when that colony was next visited no trace of the colony was found. The mystery
of what happened to those people was never discovered leading subsequent
generations to label that first settlement as the “Lost Colony.”

The most reasonable answer to what happened to those first North Carolina
settlers is that most of them facing problems with the local Indians moved North
to a settlement in Virginia on the Chesapeake Bay called Jamestown. The tragic
story of Jamestown is another trragic story.

North Carolina, in early American history, was actually a part of the
southeastern Virginia frontier. In 1629 King CHARLES I granted a part of that

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