The recent purchase of Wachovia Bank, discussed by Stephen below, will likely mark the disappearance of a historic North Carolina name from the corporate landscape. Wachovia was the name of the region in central North Carolina that was originally settled by the Moravians in the 1750s. The land was purchased from Earl Granville, and named after a location in Austria from which some of the settlers had emigrated. By the time John Collet published his map of North Carolina in 1770, of which a detail is shown here, the land had been divided, and the area called Dobbs Parish was the center of the Moravian community. The name Wachovia remained in use through the 1850s, when the nearby town of Winston was established as the seat of the recently formed Forsyth County.
