Learning in
colonial Carolina
by Betty Dishong Renter
If you had grown up in this area that has
become North Carolina during the late
1600s and early 1700s, your life would
have been very different from what it is today —
forget television . . . forget soccer practice . . .
forget chips and dip . . . forget school!
The first pioneers and settlers in colonial Carolina did not
learn in formal schools as you do today. They learned instead
by watching and imitating their parents and relatives, older
brothers and sisters, and craftspeople and elders in their
communities. Through this manner of learning, known as
informal learning, most colonial children learned what they
needed to know to live at this time: how to grow crops, build
and maintain farms, and raise families. Many boys who
were not going to become farmers learned other skills
through apprenticeships, as this young man at his loom.
Colonial learning was largely informal
That is right — you would have had no school.
Schools did not spring up in the area we now
call North Carolina as they did in colonies
like Maryland or Virginia. In most American
colonies, people came from Europe with the
intention of establishing organized, planned
communities and towns.
However, the settlers who drifted down
into Carolina were mainly from Virginia
and the northern colonies and were primarily
seeking good farmland. These family farmers,
who were known as yeomen, worked hard to
develop small, self-sufficient farms and relied
on their children to help work on those farms.
Formal schools did not develop in Carolina as they did in
the other English colonies. For one reason, most of the people
who came into the area were farmers from Virginia and
Maryland (shown, near right, circa 1 700) in search of new
farmlands — they saw no
need for the ideas taught
in schools. Still, when
Charles Griffin arrived on
the "frontier" of the colony,
the Albemarle (shown, far
right, in 1 738), he started
one. He taught children
first in the Pasquotank
Precinct, which was
largely Quaker, and
later in the Chowan
Precinct, which was
The twelve children of Augustine and
Elizabeth Dishong are examples of one family
who lived productive lives in colonial society'.
The family, which was Baptist, first owned
land in Chowan County', where Augustine
mostly Anglican.
Definitions
Apprentices learned
skilled trades (like tanning,
weaving, or blacksmithing)
or professions (like surgery or
law) while serving
apprenticeships, or while
watching and helping a
more experienced person
do that job for many years.
An apprentice was bound, or
confined to service , by a legal
agreement, or contract.
The term backcountry
refers to the area west of
the fall line, or fall zone — an
imaginary line that connects
the locations on rivers where
waterfalls are first found
when traveling inland.
Above the fall line, rivers are
more difficult to navigate.
Between 1663 and 1665,
King Charles II of England
gave the land between
Florida and the Virginia
colony — which he referred to
as Carolina — to eight of his
supporters, the Lords
Proprietors. These
noblemen operated Carolina
as a proprietary colony from
1663 to 1 729. As owners of
this proprietary colony, the
lords owned and controlled
1