The Nottingham Settlement, a North Carolina Backcountry Community

Abstract

In the 1750s, a group of Scots-Irish families migrated from southeastern Pennsylvania to central North Carolina and became known to local historians as The Nottingham Settlement. To determine the motivation behind members' migration to and settlement in present-day Guilford County, I propose that factors used to identify the Settlement, such as proximity, society, culture and religion, establish a model for North Carolina's backcountry communities in the mid-eighteenth century. Relying on methods employed in similar backcountry community studies to explore extant source materials for this specific set of colonists, the study provides local and family historians with an in-depth view of the lives of those associated with the Settlement as well as others residing nearby in colonial Guilford County.