From A HISTORY OF ROWAN COUNTY NORTH CAROLINA CONTAINING SKETCHES OF PROMINENT FAMILIES AND DISTINGUISHED MEN WITH AN APPENDIX BY REV. JETHRO RUMPLE PUBLISHED BY J. J. BRUNER SALISBURY, N. C. 1881 Copyright DMK Heritage 2004 The following are excerpts from the above-mentioned book. Page 151 According to the above list there were fifty householders in Salisbury in 1793. It has been usual to estimate an average of five inhabitants to each family. This would make a population of two hundred and fifty. But besides these white families, there were a few families of free negroes as well as the household servants in the various wealthier families. There were also a number of ordinaries, or village inns, in the borough, with their attendants and boarders. From these sources we may suppose there might be counted probably one hundred and fifty or two hundred more, making a total population of four hundred, or four hundred and fifty, in Salisbury at the close of the last century. Page 154 Besides his extensive landed estate, Alexander Long was the owner of a hundred or more slaves, and had a valuable ferry over the Yadkin at the mouth of Grant’s Creek, besides valuable fisheries on the river. In those days the Yadkin abounded with shad, and immense quantities were caught in Mr. Long’s fisheries. He had a large family of sons and daughters-John, Alexander, William, Richard, James, Nancy, Maria, Rebecca, Harriet, and Carolina. Page 163 He was on the committee that fixed the location of the University of North Carolina. The gigantic poplar tree is still standing in the University Campus, under which General Davie was resting when his negro servant reported that he had found a fine spring near by, and lots of mint growing by its side, and that he thought that was the very place for the college. Page 194-195 HON. BURTON CRAIGE the youngest son of David Craige, Jr., was born in Rowan County, March 13, 1811, at the family residence on the south fork of the Yadkin, a few miles above the point, or junction of the two rivers. His early days were spent on the farm and in attending the schools which the neighborhood afforded. About 1823-25, he attended a classical school taught in Salisbury by the Rev. Jonathan Otis Freeman. >From this school he went to the University of North Carolina, where he was graduated in the Class of 1829. Returning to Rowan, he for three years edited The Western Carolinian, and studied law 195 HISTORY OF ROWAN COUNTY under David F. Caldwell, Esq., and was licensed in 1832. The same year of his licensure he was elected to the Legislature from the Borough of Salisbury. The Borough embraced nearly the same territory comprised in the present Salisbury Township, and was a relic of the old Colonial times when Newbern, Edenton, Wilmington, Bath, Halifax, and Salisbury were each entitled to a representative in the Assembly. The convention which met in Raleigh, June 4, 1835, to amend the constitution of N orth Carolina, abolished Borough representation, and the counties thenceforth sent representatives according to population. In the old Borough system the free negroes were allowed, by sufferance, without specific legal right, to vote at elections, but under the revised constitution this was forbidden. Mr. Craige was wont to describe with much zest how the different political Parties under the old system were in the habit of herding and penning the free negroes, and low white voters also, in the “Round Bottom” and elsewhere, guarding, feeding, and treating them for several days before elections, and then marching them into town and “voting” them en masse. Sometimes the opposite Party would make a raid upon one of these pens, at the last moment, and carry off their voters in triumph. These abuses, among other things, led to the abolition of the Borough system.