Glasgow County, N.C.

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When I first spotted Glasgow County in eastern North Carolina on an old map, I thought it must be a mistake. I checked David Corbitt’s The Formation of the North Carolina Counties and it turns out that the map was correct — but not for very long. Glasgow County had a very short existence, lasting just eight years. It was formed in 1791 from Dobbs County and named for the current Secretary of State, James Glasgow. However, after Glasgow was implicated in a complicated land fraud inquiry in the late 1790s, the state legislature looked for a more appropriate namesake for the new county, settling finally (and permanently, this time) on Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene, for whom the county was named in 1799.