Qualla: Alamance County, North Carolina

Alamance County, North Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, Public domain. The name is supposedly a Native American word for the blue mud at the bottom of the creeks - though other accounts trace it to a word meaning "noisy river," and still others to the Alamanni region of the Rhineland that some early German settlers had left behind. Alamance County was carved out of Orange County in 1849, but the human history packed into its 434 square miles runs back centuries before that line was drawn. The Sissipahaw lived in the bottomlands along the Haw River. European farmers followed the trading paths in the late 1600s and put their farms on what they called the Haw Old Fields - bottomland the Sissipahaw had already cleared. The railroad came in the 1840s, and a textile boom followed that would shape the county for the next 150 years.

Image: Unknown | Public domain

Alamance County, North Carolina: Where the Regulators Lost

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NC House Representative Giles Mebane, Public domain. On May 16, 1771 - five years before the Declaration of Independence - militia under royal Governor William Tryon crushed the Regulator movement on the banks of Great Alamance Creek. The Regulators were small farmers and frontiersmen who had organized against corrupt local officia...

Image: NC House Representative Giles Mebane | Public domain

Alamance County, North Carolina: Wyatt Outlaw and the Kirk-Holden War

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlamanceWM, CC BY-SA 3.0. In February 1870, Wyatt Outlaw, a Black town commissioner in Graham, was lynched by the Ku Klux Klan and hung from a tree about thirty yards from the courthouse. A note pinned to his chest read "Beware! You guilty parties - both white and black." Outlaw was the president of the A...

Image: AlamanceWM | CC BY-SA 3.0

Alamance County, North Carolina: Plaids, Looms, and the Mills

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Indy beetle, CC0. By the 1840s the railroad was being threaded through Alamance as a link between Raleigh and Greensboro, and textile mills were already going up along the creeks. The county became famous for "Alamance plaids" - cheerful checked cottons used in everything from dresses to tableclot...

Image: Indy beetle | CC0

Alamance County, North Carolina: Quakers, Occaneechi, and the 21st Century

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beyonce245 of English Wikipedia., Public domain. The Quaker meeting houses around Snow Camp and Spring Hill are still here, some of them older than the United States. The Occaneechi people, who left the area in the 1670s after disease and conflict pushed them out, returned to North Carolina in the 1780s and settled in Alamance ...

Image: Beyonce245 of English Wikipedia. | Public domain