Qualla: Tar River

Tar River: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The river's name is the most honest place name in North Carolina. It really does mean tar. Two hundred and fifteen miles of black, slow water that for two centuries carried barrels of pine tar and turpentine downstream to the coast, where they were loaded onto British naval ships and used to caulk the world's largest navy. North Carolina was the empire's tar colony, and this was the empire's tar river. At a point in the small city of Washington, where the river slides under the U.S. 17 Bridge, it stops being the Tar and starts being the Pamlico. Same water. Same channel. New name. The boundary is the bridge.

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Tar River: Naval Stores Country

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The coastal plain of North Carolina was once covered by a near-continuous blanket of longleaf pine, a tree that produces a thick, fragrant resin. British colonial policy turned the colony into a naval stores factory: settlers tapped pines for resin, boiled it down into pine tar, ...

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Tar River: A River of Tar, Literally

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a Civil War story that purports to explain the river's name, though it is more likely a folk tale grafted onto an older origin. In March 1862, as Confederate forces prepared to abandon the town of Washington to the Union Navy, they sent squads up and down the river to de...

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Tar River: Floyd and Matthew

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The lower Tar is among the most flood-prone rivers on the Atlantic coast. In September 1999, Hurricane Floyd dumped twenty inches of rain over its watershed and the lower river suffered what hydrologists called a five-hundred-year flood - the Tar crested twenty-four feet above fl...

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Tar River: Spinymussel and Boardwalk

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Tar's biology carries one specific endangered species: the Tar River spinymussel, a small freshwater mussel found in limited stretches of the Tar and Neuse basins and almost nowhere else on Earth. Sound Rivers, an environmental group that protects both watersheds, maintains m...

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