Here’s a list of famous people from North Carolina:

• John Coltrane
• Dolley Madison
• The Dale Earnhardts
• Cecil B. DeMille
• Billy Graham
• Sugar Ray Leonard
• Roberta Flack
• Thomas Wolfe
• Andrew Johnson, sort of.
• Andrew Jackson, though he’s probably from South Carolina
• James Taylor
• Doc Watson
• James K. Polk, sort of.
• Nina Simone
• Richard Petty
• Earle Scruggs
• Andy Griffith

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I left out Soupy Sales, but you get the idea. It’s not a bad list. It’s a very respectable list, and you might come up with people I left out, but here’s the thing: this is not a list that you look at and say that the sons and daughters of North Carolina have changed everything. It’s certainly had its effect on Nascar, and two Nascar movies, Days of Thunder and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, were filmed in North Carolina. That’s a full 24 hours of driving fury. And what state wouldn’t be proud to claim John Coltrane, Doc Watson, and Nina Simone?

Talledega Nights by-the-way is the better movie. After Bull Durham, it may be the most quotable sports movie ever.

Of the three presidents on the list, Polk, Johnson, and Jackson, two were born in North Carolina but are known as Tennesseans, and the third, Jackson, was almost certainly born in South Carolina (and is also known as a Tennessean). North Carolina seems to claim him out of desperation. The state’s most important historical event was the flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The Wright Brothers were from Ohio.

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North Carolina was always one of our scruffiest states. It is, oddly enough, one of the earliest settled, or attempted settled anyway, by Europeans, first in 1524 by the Spaniard Juan Pardo with a string of forts (that promptly disappeared), and then by the British with two colonies on Roanoke Island, one in 1586 that was abandoned, and one in 1590 that disappeared, taking with it North America’s first English baby, Virginia Dare.

North Carolina wasn’t that far from the Virginia colonies, just across the state border, but the coastline was inhospitable because the Outer Banks effectively blocked navigation, and a monstrous bog, aptly named the Great Dismal Swamp, blocked immigration from English-inhabited Virginia except by the desperate–run-away indentured servants and other rif-raff. Through the Colonial Period North Carolina seems to have been settled mostly by tax scofflaws, pirates, and Quakers, and the former finally ran out the Quakers. Lack of transportation and urban areas left it relatively isolated and poor. Until World War II it was probably our poorest state.

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I had a lot of ancestors who lived in North Carolina, and at least one, born in North Carolina in 1788, seems to have made it to Texas by 1846, the year after annexation and statehood. It’s too bad, too. If he’d only made it one year earlier I could claim membership in the Sons of the Republic of Texas. I don’t know if there really is a Sons of the Republic of Texas, but I’m pretty sure there must be.

Even North Carolina’s literature seems scruffy. I suspect that nobody reads Look Homeword, Angel, any more. I read it years ago, and tried to read it again years later but couldn’t make it through. I remember it being about people who just seemed, well, scruffy. They weren’t evil enough to be bad, and were too mundane to be really memorable. The writing is supposed to be revolutionary, but that’s old hat. Even the newest, most popular North Carolina novel, Where the Crawdads Sing is about a girl who is raised by wolves in the Great Dismal Swamp, or near enough. I don’t think there are actually wolves. Kris’s book club read it, but I haven’t.

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I’ve fished in North Carolina once before, almost 30 years ago. We fished on the Davidson, in Western North Carolina. Originally this was brook trout territory, but it’s been stocked for years with rainbows and browns and the rainbows and browns have reproduced, spread, and crowded out the brookies, so that the brookies are now found mostly in small high country streams. Twenty-odd years ago I caught my first brook trout in North Carolina, a tiny thing, up above a waterfall where the rainbows couldn’t make lunch of him. We’re fishing for trout again this time, or possibly smallmouth, near the mountain town of Cashiers.

Any smallmouth east of the Appalachians are also transplants.

I’m guessing that there is a saltwater fishery along the Atlantic, and South Carolina is well-known for its redfish, but we won’t make it as far as the coast. After we fish near Bristol, Tennessee (home of Nascar’s Bristol Motor Speedway), we drive south and a bit west back to North Carolina. Shouldn’t work that way, but there you are.

When the Carolinas split in 1729, North Carolina had 6,000 slaves, while South Carolina had 32,000. Tobacco was North Carolina’s big crop, but it was not an industrial agriculture crop like cotton. There were slaves though, in Eastern North Carolina. The Carolina Quakers actively opposed slavery, which was one of the reasons they were impolitely encouraged to leave. By the 1860 census there were 331,059 slaves in North Carolina, or about 33% of the total population, compared to 57% of the population of South Carolina. There were Confederate states with fewer slaves, but they were western, newer states, Texas, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Florida. In 1860, Florida’s total population was only 140,000. I suspect that a significant part of North Carolina’s enslaved were centered in the southern rice-growing region around Cape Fear, North Carolina’s only port, and where Virginia immigrants had gathered along the coast.

During the Civil War North Carolina was relatively untouched physically, but more Confederate soldiers came from North Carolina than any other state, 130,000, more than 12% of its total population. More than 40,000 Confederate North Carolinians died during the War, about half from disease. As with Tennessee, there was considerable Union sympathy in the Appalachian portion of the state, and about 8,000 North Carolinians fought for the Union, 5,000 black, 3,000 white.

North Carolina’s population today is estimated at 10,488,084, and it’s grown consistently and fast since about 1880, when the population was about 1.4 million. It is our 9th most populous state, after Georgia but before Michigan. About 68.5% of the population is non-Hispanic white, and 21.5% African American, which leaves about 10% for everybody else. About 8.4% of the total population is Hispanic. It’s a pretty place, with a hospitable climate as long as no hurricanes blow in from the Atlantic, and I suspect a lot of the North Carolina’s growth is about it being a pretty place with a hospitable climate. People from Houston retire there.

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It is still not a wealthy state, ranked 41st, with an average annual income in 2018 of $53,888. I suspect that there are greater disparities in income in North Carolina than there are, say, in Missouri, ranked 40, or Tennessee, ranked 42, but that’s just a hunch. Like I said, affluent people from Houston retire there. Affluent people from Houston don’t retire to Missouri.

North Carolina may be one of the states that decides the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Biden needs about 40 electoral votes over what Hillary received in 2016, which means that unless he wins Texas and Florida he has to win some combination of three larger states that Hillary didn’t win. Of the states that were close in 2016, Pennsylvania (20) and North Carolina (15) would just about do it.

In 2016 President Trump took North Carolina 49.83% to 46.17%, but of all the state electoral maps I’ve looked at, North Carolina’s may be the strangest. It doesn’t appear to be driven so much by an urban/rural or a white/black split as an affluent/less affluent split, but that’s a wild guess. Maybe it’s that North Carolina has become such a refuge, and the refugees aren’t collected in big cities. Anyway, it would take a lot more delving than I’m willing to do to figure it out. Here’s the map:

Look up a map of the state and compare the two. It’s a strange jumble of who voted how, and not obviously explained by the usual splits.

One of North Carolina’s Senate seats, held by Republican Tom Tillis, is up in 2020, and the race is generally considered a toss-up, though current polling shows the Democratic challenger leading by seven points. Current polling shows Biden leading Trump 49% to 48%, which is meaningless.

And by the way, the most quotable sports movie, Bull Durham, was set in North Carolina. I will almost certainly watch Bull Durham again before the weird short season baseball business kicks off next week, and we head to North Carolina.