Fort Dobbs (North Carolina)

Fort Dobbs was an 18th-century fort in the Yadkin–Pee Dee River Basin region of the Province of North Carolina. It was built to protect the American settlers of the western portion of what was then Rowan County, and served as a vital outpost for soldiers, traders, and colonial officials. On February 27, 1760, the fort was the site of an engagement between Cherokee warriors and Provincial soldiers that ended in a victory for the Provincials. The name honors Arthur Dobbs, the Royal Governor of N.C. from 1755 to 1765, who played a role in designing the fort and authorized its construction.

About Fort Dobbs (North Carolina) in brief

Fort Dobbs was an 18th-century fort in the Yadkin–Pee Dee River Basin region of the Province of North Carolina, near what is now Statesville in Iredell County. It was built to protect the American settlers of the western portion of what was then Rowan County, and served as a vital outpost for soldiers, traders, and colonial officials. Fort Dobbs’ primary structure was a blockhouse with log walls, surrounded by a shallow ditch, and by 1761, a palisade. On February 27, 1760, the fort was the site of an engagement between Cherokee warriors and Provincial soldiers that ended in a victory for the Provincials. The fort was abandoned after 17 61, and disappeared from the landscape. The site on which the fort sat is now operated by North Carolina’s Division of State Historic Sites and Properties as Fort DobBS State Historic Site. The reconstruction of the fort has been completed on September 21, 2019, and is expected to be open to the public by the end of the year. It is the only military installation on the colonial frontier between Virginia and South Carolina that was completed between 1756 and 1756. The name honors Arthur Dobbs, the Royal Governor of N.C. from 1755 to 1765, who played a role in designing the fort and authorized its construction. Dobbs likely had a part in designing at least one other fort in North Carolina and a number of structures in Ireland, as he had close ties to Hugh Waddell, an Irish soldier to Governor Dobbs who was the commander of the Frontier Company of Provincial soldiers in 1755, and named it after the fort.

In 1756, the North Carolina Legislature set aside a sum of £1000 for the construction of a fortified log structure for the protection of settlers inRowan County from French and French-allied Native American attacks. By 1754, six western counties—Orange, Granville, Johnston, Cumberland, Anson, and Rowan—held around 22,000 residents out of the colony’s total population of 65,000. Within three years, most of North. Carolina’s population increase, driven mainly by the immigration of Scots-Irish and German settlers traveling from Pennsylvania on the Great Wagon Road, was occurring in seven western counties created after 1740. The new frontier settlements required regular protection. The total cost of theFort Stanwix in New York, begun in 1758 in a then-modern star fort style, cost £60,000 to erect. The construction of Fort Prince George in South Carolina cost that province’s House of Commons £3,000 in 1759. The same tract of land was used for the Fourth Creek Meeting House, which was the principal structure around which the modern city of Statesville was founded, and was the birthplace of James Oliphant, then a member of Fergus Sloan’s Congregation of the Free Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The land was a part of a 560-acre tract owned by one James Olphant.

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