By Linda H. Barnette
We have heard the following quote before, but it is a great way to begin a new series for the Davie County Blog. Historically, English explorers Arthur Barlowe and Phillip Amadas first used this phrase to describe the coastal region of North Carolina in 1584. They called it “the goodliest land under the scope (or cope) of heaven.” However, Ralph Lane, the leader of the second group of voyagers from England, repeated it in a 1585 letter he wrote to the English historian Richard Hakluyt, praising the beautiful place he had found. “Under the cope of heaven” was an old English way of saying “under the sky” and was used to interest people back home to come to this beautiful new land. Of course, we now know that it worked and that people began to settle in the coastal region.
One man who early on explored North Carolina was an Englishman named John Lawson (1674-1711) who ventured inland as far as what is now Davie County. Lawson was apparently an educated person, as revealed by his book. He sailed from England to Charleston, South Carolina, arriving on August 15, 1700, and eventually made his way to North Carolina. He kept a notebook of everything that he saw—and it is from him, as well as the Moravian Bishop Spangenberg, and the surveyor William Byrd, that we can learn of the Piedmont as it was then. Lawson wrote a book about his discoveries, “A New Voyage to Carolina,” and was instrumental in the founding of both New Bern and Bath. Tragically, he was captured and killed by the Tuscarora Indians in September of 1711. Fortunately, he had taken his manuscript to England and had it published there in 1709.
All 3 of these early people talked about the abundance of game and the beauty of the places they saw. Lawson said this: The soil along the Yadkin was “as rich a soil to the eye of a knowing person with us, as any of the Western World can afford.” Thus, people from Europe began early on to settle here in this beautiful place.
Sources: James Wall’s History of Davie County and Jethro Rumple’s History of Rowan County.