About an hour’s drive west from Raleigh, in North Carolina’s Moore County, the traffic thins out, the roads narrow, and the suburban sprawl of the Triangle area softens into farmland, ringed by trees, unrolling across the horizon.
While only a little over fifty miles from one of the country’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, this is still the backcountry, and has been for centuries. On a sweltering day in late June 2025, it’s not hard to imagine a similar morning in July 1781, when the warm work of musketry crackled through the torpid Carolina air, centered around what, at the time, was the grandest home in these parts, a manse that went by a poetic moniker: the House in the Horseshoe.
“It’s rural today, and it was even more so in the eighteenth century,” says Amanda Brantley, the site supervisor for what is now a state historic house museum. “There weren’t a lot of neighbors.”
Located in the North Carolina Piedmont region, on a distinctively shaped bend of the nearby Deep River (hence, the name), the two-story framed structure with a gable roof was the site of a small battle, one of many skirmishes that rumbled back and forth across the Carolina backcountry in the final years of the Revolution. The fighting here was unlike the major engagements farther north or even the series of battles between Gen. Nathanael Greene and Gen. Charles Cornwallis in other parts of the Carolinas. These backcountry dustups were not set-piece battles between Continental soldiers in blue and buff and British redcoats marching in tight formations. “Here in North Carolina, the vast majority of the backcountry fighting is between Loyalist militia and Patriot militia,” says Katie Hatton, a historian and editor with the North Carolina Office of Archives and History. “Many of those on both sides were from families that had already been here for generations.” These men and their kin knew each other, and there were often grudges and old feuds that needed to be settled. “In many cases it was like a civil war,” says Hatton.
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