Qualla: Kings Mountain National Military Park

Kings Mountain National Military Park: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The battle lasted about an hour. Patrick Ferguson, the only British soldier on the field, was shot from his horse with eight rifle balls in him. His Loyalist Americans, surrounded on a wooded Carolina ridge by overmountain riflemen they had threatened to hang, tried to surrender with white flags. The frontiersmen, remembering Tarleton's massacre at Waxhaws five months earlier, were slow to accept. By the time the killing stopped on October 7, 1780, the entire left wing of Cornwallis's army was destroyed. Thomas Jefferson, looking back, called Kings Mountain "the joyful annunciation of that turn of the tide of success." The British would not advance again in the Carolinas.

Kings Mountain National Military Park: The Threat That Made Them Come

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Patrick Ferguson, a Scottish major commanding a force of American Loyalists, had spent the summer of 1780 patrolling the Carolina backcountry on Cornwallis's left flank. He was an inventive officer - he had designed a breech-loading rifle that the British army declined to adopt -...

Kings Mountain National Military Park: Over the Mountains

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Roughly nine hundred mounted riflemen from what is now eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and southwestern Virginia gathered at Sycamore Shoals on September 25. They were militia under their own elected colonels - John Sevier, Isaac Shelby, William Campbell, Charles McDow...

Kings Mountain National Military Park: An Hour on the Ridge

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ferguson chose his ground badly. The ridge was steep but the slopes were thickly wooded, giving the climbing riflemen cover that Ferguson's musket-armed Loyalists, drawn up on the open summit, did not have. The Patriots arrived on the afternoon of October 7, 1780, dismounted, and...

Kings Mountain National Military Park: What the Victory Meant

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cornwallis, when he heard the news, abandoned his advance into North Carolina and retreated south. The Loyalist militia he had counted on to hold the Carolinas - the entire strategic premise of the British southern campaign - evaporated. Nine of the captured Loyalist officers wer...