The region is the eastern tier of the state - 41 counties east of Interstate 95, all of them part of the Atlantic Coastal Plain. It is largely flat. It is largely agricultural. It is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Virginia to the north, South Carolina to the south, and the Piedmont escarpment to the west. The major subregions are the Sandhills (rolling pine country in the southwest), the Lower Cape Fear (around Wilmington), the Crystal Coast (around Morehead City and Beaufort), the Inner Banks (the brackish estuaries inland from the coast), and the Outer Banks (the long barrier islands offshore). The total area is roughly 9,700 square miles. Fayetteville is the largest city, followed by Wilmington and Greenville.

Before the English arrived, the coast was Tuscarora, Pamlico, Coree, and Algonquian country. The Tuscarora in particular lived along the Neuse and Trent Rivers, and the Tuscarora War of 1711-1715 would mark one of the most violent colonial-era conflicts in North Carolina history. The first English attempt at New World settlement was on Roanoke Island in the 1580s, the Lost Colony, which vanished without explanation between supply ships. The first permanent English towns followed in the late 17th century - Bath, Edenton, Beaufort. New Bern came in 1710, founded by Christoph de Graffenried with Swiss and Palatine German settlers, and grew into the colonial capital. The early economy ran on tobacco, naval stores (tar, pitch, turpentine from the longleaf pines), fish, and the brutal labor of enslaved Africans. Blackbeard - the pirate Edward Teach - took refuge along these creeks and was killed at Ocracoke in 1718.

Through the colonial era and into the early republic, the east dominated North Carolina politically and economically. Then the population shifted. By the late 18th century, settlers were filling the Piedmont and the western mountains faster than the coast could grow. In 1835, the North Carolina Constitution was rewritten to dilute eastern legislative power, including a provision for popular election of the governor. The Piedmont kept growing. Charlotte and Greensboro rose. The east stayed agricultural, and after the Civil War it stayed poor. Today, nearly 21 percent of the region lives in poverty, and pockets of the northeastern coast are among the most economically distressed counties in the state. The growth that does happen is concentrated around Greenville and East Carolina University, around Wilmington's port and beaches, and around the cluster of military installations - Fort Bragg (formerly named Fort Liberty) outside Fayetteville, Camp Lejeune at Jacksonville, Cherry Point at Havelock, and Seymour Johnson at Goldsboro.

Drive across eastern North Carolina today and you see a layered landscape: corn and soybean fields, hog houses on long concrete pads, tobacco barns weathering to gray, pine plantations in tight rows, swamps thick with cypress, fishing villages on tidal creeks, and the long, low spans of bridges over rivers like the Neuse, the Tar, the Cape Fear, and the Roanoke. The Outer Banks float offshore in their own world of dunes and lighthouses. Hurricanes - Floyd, Floyd, Florence, Matthew, the list keeps growing - come ashore here with regularity, and the region's flood maps redraw themselves every few years. The Atlantic is rising, and the Outer Banks are migrating westward as the wind and waves rework them year by year.

From altitude, eastern North Carolina reads as the flat, water-laced bottom of a long ramp. The Piedmont rolls upward to the west. The coastal plain stretches flat to the east, broken only by the broad sounds of the Inner Banks and the thin lines of the Outer Banks barrier islands. Towns sit at river crossings: New Bern at the Neuse-Trent confluence, Washington on the Pamlico River, Edenton on the Albemarle Sound, Wilmington on the Cape Fear, Fayetteville at the fall line. From 10,000 feet on a clear day, you can see the entire coastal plain laid out at once - pine green, river silver, sound dark - and understand why this is the region where North Carolina began.