SOURCE: Masterson, James R. “William Byrd in Lubberland.” American Literature 9, no. 2 (May 1937): 153-70.

In the following essay, Masterson considers whether Byrd's negative impressions of colonial North Carolina were shared by other travelers.

During the spring and autumn of 1728, as one of the Virginia commissioners appointed to run a boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, Colonel William Byrd had occasion to traverse the border from Currituck Inlet, on the Atlantic coast, to a point in the foothills 241 miles to the west. In The History of the Dividing Line Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728 he disparages not only the border country but the whole province of North Carolina, which he declares to approach nearer than any other part of the world to “the Description of Lubberland.”¹ Scattered among notes of surveying, reports of Indian customs, and accounts of swamp and wilderness, his strictures upon North Carolina may be...