Qualla: Pender County, North Carolina

Pender County, North Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0. The county was born of a Civil War death. In 1875, ten years after Appomattox, the North Carolina General Assembly split the northern half of New Hanover County off into a new county of its own. They named it for William Dorsey Pender, a 29-year-old Confederate major general from Edgecombe County who had been mortally wounded by Union artillery on the second day of Gettysburg, July 2, 1863. He bled to death in a Virginia hospital sixteen days later. Pender County stretches today from the dunes of Topsail Beach across the Intracoastal Waterway, through the longleaf pine flats and the Holly Shelter Game Land, and inland to the dark swampwater of the Northeast Cape Fear River - 870 square miles in all, fifth-largest county in the state.

Image: DiscoA340 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pender County, North Carolina: Moores Creek

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0. The most consequential moment in Pender County history happened ninety-nine years before the county itself existed. On February 27, 1776, at a single-lane bridge over Moores Creek, a Patriot militia of about a thousand men confronted approximately sixteen hundred Loyalist Highlan...

Image: DiscoA340 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pender County, North Carolina: Burgaw and Hampstead

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Garrett, Public domain. The county seat is Burgaw, a town of around four thousand people built around the old Atlantic Coast Line Railroad depot - now a museum. The actual demographic center of gravity, though, sits about twenty miles southeast in Hampstead, an unincorporated census-designated place on ...

Image: Steve Garrett | Public domain

Pender County, North Carolina: Coast to Swamp

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zach Rudisin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pender's geography runs the full range of southeastern North Carolina. The eastern edge meets the Atlantic at Topsail Beach and Surf City; the long sandy barrier island runs north into Onslow County. Just inland, the marshlands and tidal creeks of the Intracoastal Waterway form a...

Image: Zach Rudisin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Pender County, North Carolina: The Black River and Its Ancient Trees

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Billy Hathorn, CC BY-SA 3.0. Along the county's western edge, the Black River drains through cypress-tupelo swamps that look essentially as they did when Verrazzano first sailed past in 1524. Researchers have core-dated bald cypresses along the Black at more than 2,600 years old - the oldest documented trees...

Image: Billy Hathorn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pender County, North Carolina: The Ashes

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. Three notable men in early American politics all came from a single farming family in Rocky Point Township, on the Pender side of what was once New Hanover. The elder John Baptista Ashe was a Patriot officer in the Revolution and a delegate to the Continental Congress. His nephew...

Image: Nyttend | Public domain