Topics Related to This Day in North Carolina History

On February 26, 1870, Graham town commissioner Wyatt Outlaw, an African American, was lynched by a band of Ku Klux Klansmen.Outlaw served in the 2nd Regiment United States Colored Cavalry during the Civil War. In 1866, he attended the second freedmen’s convention in Raleigh and soon after organized the Union League, an organization that aimed to promote loyalty to the United States after the Civil War, in Alamance County, as well as a school and church. Outlaw became the target for a Klan mob because he was an effective leader, able to work with both races.

On February 25, 1870, Hiram Revels was seated in the United States Senate.A story, perhaps apocryphal, has it that when Jefferson Davis left the U.S. Congress, fellow Senator Simon Cameron told him, “I believe, in the name of God that a Negro some day will come and occupy your seat.”Cameron’s prediction came true, and in 1870, North Carolina native Hiram Rhodes Revels became the first Black member of Congress, taking Davis’s seat representing Mississippi.

On February 25, 1820, Rep. Felix Walker delivered a rambling speech in Congress that would go little remembered but for the abuse he took that day.Walker moved to western North Carolina from what is now West Virginia in 1768. He was a militiaman and took part in the Revolutionary War. Walker served in Congress from 1817 until 1823, and at that time Buncombe County was larger than its present size and comprised the core of his Congressional district.

On February 24, 1868, Andrew Johnson became the first president to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. Johnson, the 17th  president, was born in Raleigh in 1808.

On February 23, 1983, Buckminster Fuller was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, for his contributions as a geometrician, educator and architect-designer.“Bucky” Fuller’s application of synergetic geometry to geodesic structures took root at Black Mountain College in Buncombe County. During the 1949 summer session at Black Mountain, Fuller erected, with his students and colleagues, the prototype “Autonomous Dwelling Facility with a Geodesic Structure.”

On February 23, 1911, Avery County became the last of North Carolina’s 100 counties.Located on the Tennessee border in the mountainous northwest corner of the state called the “High Country,” Avery was formed from parts of neighboring Mitchell, Watauga and Caldwell counties. It was named for Colonel Waightstill Avery, a Revolutionary War officer and the state’s first attorney general.

On February 22, 1759, Governor George Burrington, first royal governor of North Carolina, was murdered in London.An interesting and controversial figure in the colony during the proprietary and royal periods, Burrington appears in records as contentious, inflammatory and sometimes violent.  At various times he was accused of attempting to blow up colonial chief justice Christopher Gale’s house, throwing colonial official Edmund Porter’s written defense of his judgeship into the fire, horse theft and stealing the council’s secretary’s commissioning seals.

On February 22, 1856, the new “Insane Hospital of North Carolina”—renamed Dorothea Dix Hospital a century later—admitted its first patient, suffering from “suicidal mania.” Previously, families kept mentally ill members at home or local governments confined them in jails or poorhouses.