Rowan County
Salisbury and Rowan County
For most of the nineteenth century Salisbury was the largest town in western North Carolina and the place everything passed through: the wagon road, the railroads, the prisoners, and later the repair shops that kept the Southern Railway running.
Rowan and Salisbury
Rowan County was formed in 1753 out of Anson County, after nearly 350 Anson residents petitioned the legislature. It is named for Matthew Rowan, who is usually called the governor of the colony but who in fact held the office in an acting capacity as president of the council. Salisbury was incorporated in 1755 as the county seat and named for the cathedral city in Wiltshire. The first inhabitants of the area were the Catawba and Saponi.
The Great Wagon Road
German and Scots-Irish settlers came in from Pennsylvania and Virginia along the Great Wagon Road, and unlike Catawba County, Salisbury sat directly on its documented route, between what is now Winston-Salem and Charlotte. The county filled out through the 1740s and 1750s on the strength of its soil. Andrew Jackson was admitted to the bar here in 1787. In February 1781, in the weeks after Cowan’s Ford, Salisbury served as temporary headquarters for both Cornwallis and Nathanael Greene.
The Boone connection
Squire Boone, Daniel Boone’s father, left Pennsylvania on May 1, 1750 and reached the Yadkin country in late 1751 or early 1752. The family settled in what later became Davie County, which was part of Rowan when the county formed. Squire Boone served as a justice of the first Rowan County Court in June 1753 and remained an active member through 1757, and he held a license to run a public house at his own plantation. Daniel, born in Pennsylvania in 1734, was about seventeen when the family arrived and lived along the Yadkin through the 1750s and 1760s. Squire and Sarah Boone are buried at Joppa Cemetery in Mocksville.
The Confederate prison
On July 9, 1861, six weeks after North Carolina seceded, the Confederate government asked Governor Henry T. Clark whether the state could provide somewhere to hold prisoners of war. A vacant twenty-year-old textile mill in Salisbury was bought. The first prisoners — 120 men transferred from the Raleigh fairgrounds — arrived on December 9, 1861.
The facility was intended for 2,500. Beginning in early October 1864 it received ten thousand. The death rate from December 1861 through September 1864 was about two percent, roughly a hundred deaths. From October 1864 to February 1865 it rose to twenty-eight percent. Bodies were collected daily and hauled by one-horse wagon to trenches in an old cornfield; eighteen trenches are still visible in the cemetery.
A number worth correcting
The figure of 11,700 dead is inscribed in older accounts and still circulates. The US Department of Veterans Affairs, which maintains the national cemetery, states that an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers were likely buried there, and explicitly rejects the higher number. NCpedia gives roughly 4,000. This article uses the state and federal figures.
All prisoners were moved out in February 1865, about six weeks before Stoneman destroyed the prison on April 12 and 13, 1865. Salisbury National Cemetery, listed on the National Register in 1999, contains the largest number of unknown burials of any national cemetery. Its monuments include a fifty-foot granite obelisk raised between 1873 and 1876, a Maine monument of 1908 and a Pennsylvania monument of 1909 and 1910 honoring 736 soldiers. After the war Reuben and Moses Holmes bought the prison lands in 1866 and laid out the streets that became the Brooklyn-South Square Historic District.
Spencer Shops
The North Carolina Railroad, chartered in 1849 and finished in 1856, ran 223 miles from Goldsboro through Raleigh, Greensboro and Salisbury to Charlotte. The Western North Carolina Railroad ran west from Salisbury toward Morganton and Asheville, making the town the junction for the mountain line.
Southern Railway broke ground on Spencer Shops on March 23, 1896. J. P. Morgan chose the site because it lay midway between Washington and Atlanta, and it was named for Samuel Spencer, the railway’s first president. The original complex had a fifteen-stall roundhouse; a thirty-seven-stall roundhouse replaced it in 1924, and the Back Shop ran about two football fields long. At its peak Spencer employed nearly three thousand people and provided most of the work in the town of Spencer and the surrounding county.
Southern retired its last steam engine in 1953 and the shift to diesel finished the shops. The repair facility closed in 1960; the freight yard lasted until the late 1970s. In September 1977 Southern donated four acres and three buildings to the state, with more in 1979. The first exhibit area opened in 1983 and the restoration was completed in 1996 at a cost of $8 million. It is now the North Carolina Transportation Museum.
Made in Salisbury
Livingstone College was founded in 1879 as Zion Wesley Institute by African American ministers, predominantly of the A.M.E. Zion Church, with classes first held in Concord in Bishop C. R. Harris’s parsonage. Joseph Charles Price of Elizabeth City became its first president in 1882 and served until his death in 1893, teaching a philosophy of hands, head and heart. The General Assembly granted a charter and the Livingstone name in 1887, honoring the Scottish missionary David Livingstone, and the college moved to a forty-acre site near Salisbury with the town contributing a thousand dollars toward the move. It now holds over three hundred acres and includes Hood Theological Seminary. Catawba College was founded in the county in 1851.
Two products of Salisbury became household names. L. D. Peeler took a Mint Cola bottling franchise in the basement of his store on Council Street in 1913; the parent company went bankrupt in 1917 and local investors formed the Carolina Beverage Corporation to make a cherry-flavored drink using less sugar, wartime sugar being scarce. The name joined “cheer” for pleasure to “wine” for the color. The formula has never been published and the company is still run by Peeler descendants, who marked the centenary in May 2017.
The first Food Town store opened in Salisbury on December 12, 1957, founded by the brothers Ralph and Clifford Ketner with Wilson Smith. Sales grew fiftyfold across the 1960s and 1970s. The Belgian Delhaize Group acquired the company, and in 1983 it was renamed Food Lion after another chain was found to be using Food Town.
Salisbury counted 35,540 people at the 2020 census in a county of 146,875.
The prison’s death toll, and why the numbers differ
Salisbury has one number attached to it that is repeated constantly and is probably wrong, and it is carved on monuments. It is worth setting out carefully.
| Figure | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| About 3,000 to 4,000 deaths | The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and NCpedia. This is the figure this article uses. |
| 11,700 | A traditional figure, inscribed on older monuments and repeated in some accounts. The VA addresses it directly: researchers once estimated it from exhumed remains, but “the actual number of burials is probably lower.” |
| A 26 percent overall death rate | About 2 percent from December 1861 to September 1864, rising to 28 percent between October 1864 and February 1865, when the population went from hundreds to ten thousand. |
| Eighteen trenches | Still visible in the national cemetery, which holds the largest number of unknown burials of any national cemetery in the country. |
| The site afterwards | Reuben and Moses Holmes bought the former prison lands in 1866 and laid out the street grid that became the Brooklyn–South Square Historic District. |
A correction that matters for a page like this one. Daniel Boone did not practice at the Salisbury courthouse. What is documented is that his father, Squire Boone, served as a justice of the first Rowan County Court in June 1753 and remained an active member through 1757, and that the family’s Yadkin valley land lay within Rowan County as it was then bounded — in what later became Davie County. Squire and Sarah Boone are buried at Joppa Cemetery in Mocksville.
Frequently asked questions
When was Salisbury founded?
Rowan County was formed in 1753 and Salisbury was incorporated as its county seat in 1755, named for the English cathedral city.
How many prisoners died at Salisbury Prison?
The Department of Veterans Affairs and NCpedia estimate 3,000 to 4,000. The traditional figure of 11,700 is explicitly rejected by the VA.
What was Spencer Shops?
Southern Railway’s main repair complex, begun in 1896 midway between Washington and Atlanta. It employed nearly three thousand people at its peak and closed as a repair facility in 1960. It is now the North Carolina Transportation Museum.
What is the Daniel Boone connection to Salisbury?
Daniel Boone’s father Squire Boone sat as a justice of the first Rowan County Court in June 1753, and the family lived along the Yadkin, then part of Rowan County.
Where did Cheerwine come from?
Salisbury. L. D. Peeler began bottling in 1913 and the Carolina Beverage Corporation was formed in 1917 to make the cherry-flavored drink. It is still owned by his descendants.
Sources for this article
Rowan County and the wider region
Adkins Law serves families across the Piedmont, with offices in Huntersville and, through Adkins & Purkey, in Locust.
Adkins Law, PLLC · 9620 Sherrill Estates Road, Huntersville, NC 28078
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This article is local history, offered for general interest. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Historical accounts are drawn from the sources listed above; where sources disagree, that is noted in the text. For advice about your own situation, speak with a licensed North Carolina attorney.