North Carolina

Settlement & growth (pre-1960)

Long before European contact, North Carolina was home to several major Native American nations. The Cherokee controlled the mountainous western region, with their central settlement at what is now Cherokee in Swain County. The Tuscarora and Algonquian-speaking tribes, including the Secotan and Chowanoke, inhabited the coastal plain, with villages near present-day Edenton and Bath. The Tuscarora War (1711-1715) resulted in their defeat and migration north, opening the interior to European settlement.

English colonists from Virginia began moving south into the Albemarle Sound region in the 1650s, establishing the first permanent European settlements around Elizabeth City and Edenton. These early settlers were primarily small farmers and tobacco planters, creating a society distinct from the plantation-heavy Lowcountry of South Carolina. The port of Wilmington, founded in 1739, became a major hub for the naval stores industry—tar, pitch, and turpentine from the state’s vast pine forests—which drove the colonial economy.

The single largest wave of pre-Revolutionary migration was the Scots-Irish and German influx along the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania between 1730 and 1775. These immigrants, largely Presbyterian and Lutheran, poured down the Shenandoah Valley and settled the Piedmont region. They founded Salisbury (1753), Charlotte (1768), and Winston-Salem (the Moravian settlement of Salem, 1766). The Scots-Irish, in particular, shaped the state’s fiercely independent, anti-aristocratic political culture, a legacy that persists in the Piedmont’s conservative leanings. Germans, especially the Moravians, established tightly-knit religious communities in Forsyth County.

After the American Revolution, the plantation economy expanded into the coastal plain, driven by cotton and tobacco. This led to the forced migration of enslaved Africans, who by 1860 made up roughly one-third of the state’s population. The Black population concentrated in the northeastern counties, such as Halifax and Bertie, and in the rich cotton lands around Fayetteville. Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, many freedmen remained as sharecroppers and tenant farmers in these same areas.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the rise of the textile and furniture industries, which drew rural white and Black workers to mill towns like Gastonia, Burlington, and High Point. The tobacco industry centered on Durham and Winston-Salem created a class of wealthy industrialists and a large workforce. The Great Migration (1910-1970) saw hundreds of thousands of Black North Carolinians leave for Northern cities, while the state simultaneously experienced an influx of poor white farmers from the mountains and Piedmont into the mill villages. By 1960, North Carolina was still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural, with a population that was roughly 75% white and 25% Black, and almost no Hispanic or Asian presence.

Modern era (post-1965)

The 1965 Hart-Cellar Act had a relatively muted direct effect on North Carolina compared to states like California or Texas. The foreign-born population remains low at 5.0%. However, the act’s indirect effects, combined with domestic migration, have transformed the state. The most significant demographic shift since 1965 has been the explosive growth of the Hispanic population, which rose from negligible levels in 1970 to 10.9% today. This wave began in the 1990s, driven by labor demand in construction, agriculture, and meatpacking. Hispanic immigrants, primarily from Mexico and Central America, concentrated in Charlotte (especially East and South Charlotte), the poultry-processing towns of the western Piedmont like Siler City and Monroe, and the agricultural counties of the coastal plain such as Duplin and Sampson.

The East/Southeast Asian population (1.8%) and Indian subcontinent population (1.3%) are smaller but highly concentrated. The Research Triangle Park, established in 1959, began attracting highly skilled professionals from Asia in the 1980s and 1990s. Cary and Morrisville in Wake County have become major enclaves for Indian and Chinese tech workers, with Cary’s Asian and Indian population combined exceeding 20%. Charlotte’s banking sector has also drawn Indian and East/Southeast Asian professionals, particularly to the Ballantyne and SouthPark neighborhoods.

The most transformative force in modern North Carolina, however, has been domestic migration. Since the 1970s, the state has been a primary destination for the Rust Belt-to-Sun Belt movement. Retirees, professionals, and families from New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Michigan have flooded into the Charlotte metro area, the Raleigh-Durham-Cary corridor, and the coastal counties around Wilmington. This in-migration has dramatically increased the white population in previously Black-majority rural areas and has driven suburban sprawl. The state’s political shift from reliably Democratic to a competitive purple state—and increasingly Republican—is directly tied to these new arrivals, who tend to be more conservative than their home-state peers but more moderate than native-born North Carolinians on some social issues.