Location: NC 39 at Townsville
County: Vance
Original Date Cast: 1989
In his introduction to Volume VII of The Colonial Records of North Carolina, William L. Saunders wrote, “The first recorded mutterings of the troubles that grew into the War of the Regulation were heard in Granville County, and were contained in the Nutbush paper of the 6th of June 1765.” The Nutbush Address, as it is more commonly known, has not escaped the attention of other historians, being the subject over the years of writings by Benson J. Lossing, Archibald Henderson, R. D. W. Connor, William K. Boyd, and Nannie May Tilley, among others.
The document, entitled “An Address to the People of Granville County,” set forth in graphic language “the most notorious and intolerable abuses” of power the people were forced to suffer, mentioning specifically excessive taxes, high rents, extortionate fees, and fraudulent accounting of public funds. Its particular target was Samuel Benton, political czar of colonial Granville. Its author was George Sims, a schoolteacher living in that portion of Granville (present-day Vance) County known as Nutbush. With wide circulation of the Nutbush Address, public temper in the “Granville District” became increasingly agitated. Regulator leader Herman Husband quoted from the letter and used it to his advantage in the subsequent revolt.
References:
William L. Saunders, ed., Colonial Records of North Carolina, VII, (1886), xx, 89-90
R. D. W. Connor, History of North Carolina (1919), I, 306
W. K. Boyd, “Some North Carolina Tracts of the 18th Century,” North Carolina Historical Review (January 1926): 52-70
Nannie May Tilley, “Political Disturbances in Colonial Granville County,” North Carolina Historical Review (October 1941): 338-359
Hugh T. Lefler and Alfred Ray Newsome, History of a Southern State: North Carolina (1973), 183-184
William S. Powell et al., The Regulators in North Carolina (1971)
Samuel T. Peace, Zeb’s Black Baby: Vance County, North Carolina (1955)
George Sims Paper, North Carolina State Archives