“Looking then to the Cape for the idea and reason of its name, we find that it is the southernmost point of Smith’s Island, a naked, bleak elbow of sand jutting far out into the ocean. Immediately in its front are the Frying Pan Shoals, pushing out still farther, twenty miles to sea. Together they stand for warning and for woe; and together they catch the long majestic roll of the Atlantic as it sweeps through a thousand miles of grandeur and power from the Arctic towards the Gulf. It is the play-ground of billows and of tempests, the kingdom of silence and awe, disturbed by no sound but the sea-gull’s shriek and the breakers’ roar. Its whole aspect is suggestive, not of repose and beauty, but of desolation and terror. Imagination cannot adorn it. Romance cannot hallow it. Local pride cannot soften it. There it stands to-day, bleak and threatening and pitiless, as it stood three hundred years ago, when Grenville and White came near unto death upon its sands. And there it will stand, bleak and threatening and pitiless, until the earth and the sea shall give up their dead. And as its nature, so its name, is now, always has been, and always will be, the ‘Cape of Fear.’” But the broad sounds and rivers and fertile lands which lay behind these barriers of sand and storm invited immigration, and soon after the middle of the seventeenth century settlers began to pour in by different routes. From Virginia they crowded across into the northern and eastern sections. The Swiss and the Palatines came into the Neuse, and by the middle of the eighteenth century the Highland Scotch were swarming up the Cape Fear, while the Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania spread over the country on both sides of the Yadkin, and westward to the Catawba, where they were mingled with the Germans, who also came mostly by way of Pennsylvania. Coming into the country by different routes, separated from each other by the unsettled wilderness, finding no centre of power or of influence within the Province to draw them together, each of these sections lived in a measure to itself, and communicated with the outside world through those routes of travel by which each had first entered the country. The Albemarle section traded with Virginia, Cape Fear with Barbadoes and Charleston. The Scotch-Irish of the Piedmont country were better acquainted with their brethren in Pennsylvania, and in nearer sympathy with them, than with the Scotch on the upper Cape Fear and lower Yadkin. The little settlement of Maryland Churchmen in Rowan kept up communication with their kinsfolk in St. Mary’s County at the mouth of the Potomac, and their Lutheran neighbors sent back to Hanover for teachers and ministers, and had their services in the German tongue until well on in the nineteenth century.