Fayetteville, NC news and local guide

The area was heavily settled by Gaelic-speaking Highland Scots in the mid and late 1700s, and most stayed loyal to the Crown. They were defeated at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge. Flora MacDonald, famous for helping Bonnie Prince Charlie escape after Culloden in 1746, lived in North Carolina for about five years and helped her husband raise Scots to fight for the King. Patriots in late June 1775 drew up the Liberty Point Resolves, a little more than a year before the Declaration of Independence. Robert Rowan, a merchant, sheriff and legislator who led the local Patriot cause, signed first. The 1780s were Fayetteville's "golden decade." In 1789 it hosted the state convention that ratified the Constitution and the General Assembly session that chartered the University of North Carolina, but it lost the contest for the permanent capital to Raleigh. The Fayetteville Independent Light Infantry, formed in 1793, is still active as a ceremonial unit, the second-oldest militia unit in the country. Henry Evans, a free Black shoemaker and preacher remembered as the area's Father of Methodism, preached to enslaved people despite white opposition. Sources Wikipedia: Fayetteville, North Carolina