12 Things North Carolinians Learned in School About North Carolina History That Turned Out to Be Wrong

School history lessons often to come with tidy stories and neat endings.

But some of what North Carolinians learned has since been corrected or complicated by historians.

Here’s what the record shows today.

1. Edenton Tea Party

Many school history lessons pictured the Edenton Tea Party as women tossing tea into the water, Boston style.

If you picture crates splashing into the ocean, you’re thinking of Boston.

According to the North Carolina History Project, Edenton saw no dumping of tea into the ocean.

What happened on October 25, 1774, was a signature drive, as 51 women signed a resolution to stop buying English tea and cloth.

The women put their names on the page and sent the resolution to England.

That took nerve.

NCpedia calls the resolution among the first public political acts by women in America.

2. Sir Walter Raleigh

Some school lessons put Sir Walter Raleigh on the shore at Roanoke Island, directing the colonists in person.

Raleigh never set foot on the land that became North Carolina, according to NCpedia.

He sent others.

What he did was pay for several voyages to settle the coast north of Florida.

If you ever pictured him pacing the shore at Roanoke, you can retire that image.

3. Roanoke’s Lost Colony

A lot of history lessons told the Lost Colony as a settlement that vanished without a word.

When John White returned to Roanoke Island on August 18, 1590, he found the settlement deserted, with the houses dismantled, according to NCpedia.

The word CROATOAN was carved into a palisade.

If your lesson said they left nothing behind, it skipped the carving.

You can trace Croatoan to the Hatteras Native people and their principal town near Cape Hatteras.

That’s a clue.

White set out for Croatoan, but a storm forced him back to England.

He never learned what became of the colonists.

The fate of the Lost Colony remains a mystery today.

4. Kitty Hawk

Many history classes put the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk.

North Carolina’s highway historical marker B-4 says Orville and Wilbur Wright made the flight on December 17, 1903, from a site near the foot of Kill Devil Hill.

Close, but not quite.

If you’ve told someone the brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, the answer on the marker is Kill Devil Hill.

The National Park Service puts that first flight at 12 seconds and 120 feet.

You may not know the brothers had already made almost 1,000 glider flights on Kill Devil Hills in the fall of 1902.

5. Blackbeard

Some school history lessons treated Blackbeard as an outlaw the state hunted down.

North Carolina’s governor, Charles Eden, gave Blackbeard and at least 20 members of his crew a pardon in June 1718, according to NCpedia.

Virginia’s governor had other plans.

Governor Alexander Spotswood sent Lieutenant Robert Maynard after the pirate.

Blackbeard died in a battle off Ocracoke Island on November 22, 1718.

The two sloops Spotswood leased each had a pilot from North Carolina.

If you grew up hearing that the state finished him, Virginia organized the force that did.

6. Mecklenburg Declaration

Many history lessons taught you the Mecklenburg story as proof the state led on independence.

The state flag still carries May 20, 1775, a date NCpedia traces to that declaration, which it calls debunked.

Its text appeared in the Raleigh Register in 1819, 44 years after that date, at the request of U.S. Senator Nathaniel Macon.

The original was supposedly destroyed in a fire in 1800.

John McKnitt Alexander reconstructed the published text from memory.

Thomas Jefferson dismissed it as a hoax.

What’s documented is the Mecklenburg Resolves of May 31, 1775, which contemporary newspapers confirm.

On April 12, 1776, the Halifax Resolves authorized North Carolina’s delegates to vote for independence.

The state’s Department of Natural and Cultural Resources says North Carolina became the first colony to officially put such intentions on paper.

That one holds up.

If you want a date to trust, the flag’s other date, April 12, 1776, honors those resolves.

7. Charlotte's Hornets' Nest

A lot of school lessons credited Charlotte's Hornets' Nest nickname to something Lord Cornwallis said.

The Battle of Charlotte took place on September 26, 1780, when British troops under Cornwallis met a smaller force of North Carolina Patriots.

A 2026 exhibit at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte's Atkins Library called the remark local lore and noted that no writings by Cornwallis from the time confirm it.

So if you've heard Cornwallis said it, you've heard a story, not a document.

Charlotte kept the name anyway.

8. Andrew Jackson's Birthplace

Some history classes stated flatly that Andrew Jackson was born in North Carolina.

Jackson's exact birthplace is still disputed, according to NCpedia.

Jackson believed he was born in South Carolina, and North Carolina didn't claim him until 15 years after his death.

The claim came late.

Some North Carolina historians point to a Jackson family cabin near the head of Ligget's Branch, a tributary of Twelve Mile Creek.

If you were taught a single spot, you were taught one theory.

9. Greensboro's Sit-Ins

Many school history lessons start the sit-in story at the Greensboro lunch counter.

On June 23, 1957, the Reverend Douglas Moore and six others took booths at the Royal Ice Cream parlor in Durham.

The business had separate doors for white and Black customers.

Nearly three years earlier.

Police arrested them for trespassing, and a court fined each of them $10 plus court costs the next day.

NCpedia says the Greensboro sit-ins of 1960 sparked a national movement but weren't the first such action.

If your history class skipped Durham, you missed a case that tested whether segregated facilities were legal.

10. Cherokee Removal

Some history classes ended the Cherokee story with the Trail of Tears.

The removal west ran from October 1838 to March 1839.

NCpedia estimates that about 4,000 of the roughly 15,000 who started the trek died.

Not everyone left.

Roughly 300 to 400 Cherokee stayed in North Carolina, hiding in the mountains.

Many Cherokee gave money to William Holland Thomas, their agent, to buy land.

That land became most of the Qualla Boundary, the home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina, which covers 57,000 acres.

If your lesson ended at the Trail of Tears, you missed the Cherokee who stayed.

11. Wilmington's 1898 Coup

Many school lessons called what happened in Wilmington a race riot.

According to NCpedia, white leaders claimed the violence was needed to restore order, and most historians who used the term race riot repeated that narrative.

On November 10, 1898, Alfred Moore Waddell and others worked to overthrow Wilmington's elected city government.

By late afternoon, they had forced the elected officials to resign.

The newly seated board of aldermen then elected Waddell mayor.

That's a coup.

North Carolina's Department of Natural and Cultural Resources titles its page on the event the 1898 Wilmington Coup.

If you learned it as a riot, you learned the story the white leaders told.

12. Lost Cause Textbooks

Some older school history textbooks told the Civil War as a fight over states' rights, and you might have read a version that treated slavery as a footnote.

A 2023 East Carolina University master's thesis follows the United Daughters of the Confederacy's campaign to put Lost Cause history into Southern school books.

The thesis covers the years 1890 through 1976.

In 1860, 331,059 of North Carolina's 992,622 people were enslaved, according to NCpedia.