Topics Related to This Day in North Carolina History

On October 21, 1866, Tom Dula was convicted of the murder of Laura Foster. Dula was hanged for the crime in May 1868.

On October 20, 1898, John Merrick and six fellow investors met in the office of Dr. Aaron Moore to organize the North Carolina Mutual and Provident Association.

Maj. Gen. Stephen Dodson Ramseur, born in 1837 in Lincolnton, led his division in the Shenandoah Campaign during the Civil War. On October 19, 1864, he was mortally wounded at Cedar Creek, Virginia.

On October 20, 1862, Annie Carter Lee, daughter of Robert E. Lee, died in Warren County. She had been ill with typhoid fever while visiting the Jones Springs resort there.Lee sent both Annie and her sister Agnes to North Carolina in June 1862 when Union troops occupied their home in Arlington, Va. When Annie died it was not possible to take her body back to Arlington, which was then behind enemy lines. The owner of Jones Springs offered to have her body buried in his family cemetery and the Lees accepted.

On October 19, 1948, President Harry S. Truman visited Raleigh and delivered the main address at the unveiling of the “Presidents North Carolina Gave the Nation” monument on Union Square, which surrounds the State Capitol.

On October 19, 1781, Lord Cornwallis surrendered more than 8,000 troops to a combined Franco-American force at Yorktown. The surrender came on the heels of much fighting in North Carolina. From January to March 1781, Cornwallis’s army pursued troops—including some local militia—under Daniel Morgan around the state. He continued chasing Morgan’s successor Nathanael Greene, in what became known as the “Race to the Dan.”

On October 19, 1874, R.J. Reynolds purchased his first lot, next to rail lines in Winston, from the Moravian Church.Born into a prosperous Virginia tobacco family, Reynolds started what he called the “Little Red Factory” in 1874 with just $7,500 and some college and business school under his belt. A year later, the factory and its 12 workers had produced 150,000 pounds of southern flat plug chewing tobacco.

Asheville author Thomas Wolfe turned his observations of growing up in his mother's boarding house, the "Old Kentucky Home" into his best known novel Look Homeward, Angel. His mother's boardinghouse is now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, one of 27 state historic sites.