8 Things North Carolinians Are Tired of Hearing From Virginians

North Carolina has over two million more residents than Virginia.

That hasn’t slowed down the lecture a Tar Heel gets at a reception in Richmond, or in a tailgate lot in Charlottesville, or anywhere a Virginian spots an opening.

These are the things North Carolinians are tired of hearing from Virginians.

1. Barbecue Started in Virginia

North Carolina barbecue is a whole hog split over coals, and Virginia would like a word about who thought of it first.

The Old Dominion’s tourism arm markets the state as the birthplace of American barbecue.

Many Virginians repeat that line like it settles something.

It settles nothing.

Cooks in the Coastal Plain were basting split hogs with cider vinegar, red pepper, and salt long before anybody printed a brochure about it.

Lexington answers with chopped shoulder and a thin tomato dip, so eastern and western cooks have argued about the sauce ever since.

Bring a founding claim to a pit in Ayden and see how far it travels.

2. Mother of Presidents

North Carolina claims three presidents and lost the credit for all three.

James K. Polk and Andrew Johnson were born inside the state’s borders.

North Carolina puts Andrew Jackson’s birthplace in a Union County cabin.

South Carolina has disputed that one for more than a century.

All three ran from Tennessee.

Virginia counts eight, from George Washington through Woodrow Wilson.

That’s where “Mother of Presidents” comes from, and the Commonwealth answers to “Mother of States” too, since parts of eight more states came out of land Virginia once claimed.

A Virginian gets to both titles before the appetizers land.

3. Jamestown Beat Roanoke

England’s first attempt at an American colony landed on Roanoke Island, in what’s now North Carolina.

It ended with 116 colonists gone, two of them babies born in the New World.

Nobody has ever found them.

Virginia’s turn came twenty years later at Jamestown, which held on and became the first permanent English settlement in the country.

So a Virginian brings up the word “permanent,” then leans on it.

Then comes Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World, delivered on Roanoke Island in 1587 and named for a territory Sir Walter Raleigh had already christened Virginia.

She was born on Carolina sand.

The Commonwealth still puts her on the list.

4. Those Are Virginia Peanuts

North Carolina grows the peanut that carries Virginia’s name.

Call them Carolina peanuts at a Norfolk cookout and a Virginian will set you straight.

Those are Virginia peanuts.

The Virginia Peanut Growers Association takes credit for coining the term Virginia-type, tracing it to the first commercial crop near Wakefield in 1842.

Virginia’s tourism site calls the variety by far the most sought-after in America, then admits higher up the same page that it also grows in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas.

The name describes a size and a shape, not a state line.

North Carolina farmers brought in 510 million pounds in 2022.

Nearly 650 growers belong to the state’s peanut association, against Virginia’s roughly 200.

Roadside stands from Windsor to Enfield sell them boiled in the shell, salty enough to ruin a shirt.

Every tin still says Virginia.

5. That Declaration Never Happened

North Carolina put a date on its flag that a Virginian is happy to poke holes in.

May 20, 1775 sits on the top scroll, for the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Jefferson called it a hoax.

He wrote that to John Adams in 1819, and the letter reached print in 1829.

The North Carolina legislature was angry enough to appoint a committee to prove him wrong.

It didn’t.

Historians have sided with Jefferson ever since, and North Carolinians know the story is shaky.

They’d just rather not hear about it from Charlottesville every May.

6. Birthplace of American Wine

In 1840, no state in the country made more wine than North Carolina.

That isn’t the version a Virginian tells.

Virginia sells itself as the birthplace of American wine, tracing the story to vines planted near Jamestown in 1609.

The vines kept dying.

Thomas Jefferson handed 2,000 acres beside Monticello to an Italian grower and never brought in a single harvest.

North Carolina answers with the Mother Vine on Roanoke Island, a scuppernong long reputed to be the oldest grapevine in the United States.

Historians have argued over its age for more than a century.

Jefferson tasted North Carolina wine and compared it favorably to Europe’s.

That part doesn’t come up as often.

7. South’s Oldest Rivalry

North Carolina and Virginia first met on a football field in 1892, and they’ve squared off more times than any other pair of Atlantic Coast Conference programs.

Virginia named the series the South’s Oldest Rivalry.

Auburn and Georgia had already played that same year.

So the title stretches, and nobody in Charlottesville seems bothered by it.

Virginia won the first meeting too, a detail Cavaliers fans keep handy.

Tar Heels counter with basketball, where North Carolina holds six national championships to Virginia’s one.

That usually ends it.

8. Tar Heel Was an Insult

North Carolinians wear the words Tar Heel on hats, hoodies, and license plate frames.

Virginia handed the nickname over as a taunt.

Soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia coined it around 1862 for the Carolina troops beside them, and at Fredericksburg somebody hollered at a passing brigade to clap a foot down and stick.

The Carolinians fired right back.

A limping mountaineer told a group of Mississippians that if they’d kept tar on their own heels the day before, North Carolina wouldn’t have had to retake the works.

By 1864, Governor Zebulon Vance was addressing the troops as “Fellow Tar Heels,” and Robert E. Lee is said to have called out, “Thank God for the Tar Heel boys.”

So when a Virginian brings up where the name came from, the rest of the story is already written down.

North Carolina kept the insult and put it on everything.

Virginia’s Long Head Start

Virginia’s head start on North Carolina was no myth, and it lasted a long while.

The Commonwealth ratified the Constitution more than a year ahead of North Carolina.

It had the deep-water harbors on the Chesapeake, the tobacco money, and the men who wrote the founding documents.

A Charlotte speaker put words to the position in 1900, calling North Carolina a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit.

The mountains were Virginia to the north and South Carolina to the south.

Tar Heels have repeated the phrase ever since, half complaint and half brag.

The numbers have shifted since.

North Carolina passed 11 million people in 2024 and now ranks ninth in the nation, after adding 165,000 residents in a single year.

Only Texas, Florida, and California grew by more.

Virginia’s latest Census estimate comes to 8.9 million.

The difference is more than two million residents.

The Book That Started It

North Carolina has been graded in print by Virginians since 1728.

That year a joint commission surveyed the boundary between the two colonies, and Virginia sent William Byrd II of Westover to speak for its side.

Byrd took notes.

His account of the survey described the Carolina side as Lubberland, a place where the climate was easy, provisions came cheap, and the people did as little as they could get away with.

He liked the country anyway.

Byrd bought 20,000 acres of the Dan River valley from the North Carolina commissioners and named the tract the Land of Eden.