With talk of Roy Cooper joining the Democratic presidential ticket, we spent time last week reviewing the results of his successful 2016 and 2020 gubernatorial elections. Donald Trump also carried North Carolina in 2016 and 2020, and a few counties went for both Trump and Cooper. One county that swung for Trump and Cooper in both elections (and was carried by Barack Obama and Pat McCrory in 2012)? Granville. Here’s a bit more on the childhood home of Jim Blaine, a rural county that’s become a bellwether for statewide candidates.
Granville County was “formed in 1746 from the western portion of Edgecombe County, and was named in honor of John Carteret, Earl of Granville, one of the Lord Proprietors of the colony”, according to the Granville County government’s history. Because there was no western border, the original territory that comprised Granville County extended all the way to the Mississippi River.
One of America’s founding fathers hails from Granville County: John Penn, who served multiple terms in the Continental Congress and signed both the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation as a delegate of North Carolina, moved to Stovall from Virginia in 1774. He was elected to the Continental Congress in 1775, re-elected in 1777, 1778 and 1779 and is said to have served with distinction.
The historical highway marker honoring Penn was erected in 1936 and was the first such marker installed by the state.
Like most early counties on the eastern side of North Carolina, Granville was a site of the Tuscarora uprising. Once the natives were defeated in the Tuscarora War, Virginia farmers and their families settled Granville County, where they concentrated on tobacco as a commodity crop.
The Civil War brought an end to the plantation and slave labor economy that long made Granville County prosperous, but agriculture continued to power the county’s economy, especially after the discovery of bright leaf tobacco. Granville’s sandy soil and the new “flue-dried” tobacco crop proved to be a boon to local farmers and tobacco manufacturers. Granville remained a top tobacco-producing county for several decades and by the late 1800s, Oxford grew to become a thriving town with new industries, schools, and libraries.
During the Great Depression, the county’s cash crop fell victim to a new plant disease. The “Granville Wilt Disease” destroyed tobacco crops across northern North Carolina. Botanists and horticulturists eventually found a cure for the disease, at the Tobacco Research Center located in Oxford.
Camp Butner was a US Army installation in the county during World War II. It was named after Army general and North Carolina native Henry W. Butner. Part of the camp was used as a POW camp for German prisoners and the site later became the Federal prison, which still operates today and recently housed scam artist Bernie Madoff until his death in 2021.
Another notable Granville County native: Civil Rights Activist Ben Chavis, a member of the Wilmington 10 who was born and raised in Oxford. A 12-year-old Chavis was the first African American to be issued a library card at the segregated public library. He went on to lead a protest in 1970 at the state capital after three white men were acquitted of killing African American Army Veteran Henry Marrow in a racial confrontation in Oxford. Chavis and the Wilmington 10 were convicted of arson during a civil rights protest for school desegregation. The oldest of the group, at just 24, Chavis was sentenced to 34 years in prison and served two years. The convictions and sentences were overturned in 1980 by a federal appeals court for prosecutorial misconduct. Governor Bev Perdue pardoned the Wilmington 10 in 2012.
Like most rural counties in Eastern North Carolina, voting in Granville County has historically been racially polarized and Democratic voter registrations have fallen in recent years. As noted above, it has been a competitive county in recent statewide elections.
