Daniel Boone Chapter NSDAR

08/31/2026

On the weekend of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, we are calling on Americans nationwide to pause together in remembrance and unity, marking the occasion with two tributes: a coast-to-coast flag waving and the dedication of a new Woody Williams Gold Star Families Memorial Monument.

Read more about our weekly flag waving tradition and how we are honoring the anniversary of 9/11 this year:
https://www.wreathsacrossamerica.org/Home/News/1617

08/30/2026

North Carolina was the second to last state to join the United States, and it was not an accident. It was a deliberate holdout. 📜

The Hillsborough Convention of 1788 had refused to ratify the new federal Constitution. It did not reject it either. It simply declined to act, and North Carolina sat outside the Union while eleven other states went in. The objection was specific and it was not stubbornness for its own sake. There was no bill of rights in the document, and a great many North Carolinians were not willing to hand a distant government that much power on a promise.

Then James Madison put a proposed bill of rights before Congress in the spring of 1789. That changed the arithmetic. Federalists pushed the General Assembly to send the question back to the voters, and a second convention met at Fayetteville from November 16 to November 23, 1789. On November 21 the delegates voted to ratify, and North Carolina became the twelfth state. The recorded tally is 195 to 77, though a few accounts put it at 194 to 77.

Think about what that year of waiting actually bought. The state that held out longest for written guarantees of individual liberty got them, and then joined. Rhode Island was the only one still outside, and it came in the following May. 🇺🇸

08/30/2026

Join the Southern Appalachian Historical Association (SAHA) for a special evening with author and historian Randell Jones as he presents “Between Two Sons,” an engaging look at Daniel Boone’s life during the American Revolution.
As we continue to celebrate America 250, come discover the story of Daniel Boone, his family, and the difficult choices faced during the Revolutionary era.
Bring your family and friends for an evening of fascinating history, storytelling, and a chance to meet the author!
Don’t miss this FREE special event!

September 15, 2026
6:00 PM
Appalachian Theatre: Community Room | Boone, NC
FREE ADMISSION!

Following the presentation, Randell Jones will be available for a book signing.

08/30/2026

Save the date and mark your calendars! National Wreaths Across America Day 2026 will take place on Saturday, December 19!

08/28/2026

08/26/2026

The National Park Service was created on August 25, 1916, to "preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations." Over the hundred plus years, we've grown into more than 400 national parks and many programs that reach communities around the country—and even the world!

Here are ten suggestions for celebrating our 110th birthday this year. Or you can keep going with 110 ideas of your own!
1. Visit a national park. Entrance fees are waived for our birthday! Remember to check your park's website to plan ahead.
2. Post your national park celebration on social media using , , and .
3. Download the NPS App and send your family and friends virtual postcards using your own favorite photos of parks.
4. Go on a ranger program or talk to a ranger in a park.
5. Hit a trail on foot, bike, or boat.
6. Visit a monument, memorial, or hallowed ground to reflect.
7. Earn a Junior Ranger badge.
8. Join our team as a volunteer for an event or sign up for year-round.
9. Party past sundown to see the night sky at a night sky program.
10. BYOBC. Bring Your Own Birthday Cake and have a picnic! Feed the rangers, not the wildlife.


Image Courtesy of National Park Service
Image Description: A park ranger hat next to a cupcake with a candle in it

08/23/2026

In 1780, the Battle of Camden took place in present-day Kershaw County, South Carolina. American General Horatio Gates faced off against British General Charles Cornwallis in the sandhill country north of Camden.

The battle was a devastating loss for the Americans, with Gates and his army being completely defeated. There were about 3700 American troops in the battle, and over 1900 of them were either killed, wounded, or captured. The British had 2250 troops and suffered around 325 casualties.

The British victory was completed when Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton and his British Legion attacked the last standing Continental troops on the field from behind. Continental commander, General Johann Baron de Kalb was fatally wounded during the final stand and died a few days later.

One surviving Continental officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Eager Howard of Maryland, gathered as many survivors as he could and led them on a challenging journey through the wilderness, avoiding British patrols on the way back to Hillsborough, North Carolina.

General Gates’s defeat at Camden marked the second loss of a Continental Army in South Carolina within 90 days. At a critical time in the Revolution, General Nathanael Greene took command of the battered remnants of Gate’s Southern Army in late 1780.

In January 1781, Banastre Tarleton and John Eager Howard met again on the battlefield at Cowpens. At Cowpens, General Daniel Morgan’s army nearly wiped-out Tarleton’s command, and this time it was Tarleton who fled from the battlefield with his surviving troops, avoiding American patrols on a desperate journey to safety.



NPS Image, Painting by Pamela Patrick White.

08/21/2026

Cornwallis took Charlotte in an afternoon and spent the next two weeks wishing he had not. 🐝

On September 26, 1780, the British army came up the road into a village of maybe twenty houses. Waiting at the square was Colonel William Richardson Davie with about a hundred and fifty men, most of them posted behind the low stone wall of the market house under the courthouse. When the British Legion cavalry came down the street, Davie's riflemen emptied saddles and drove them back. It happened a second time before weight of numbers told and Davie pulled out in good order.

Holding the town turned out to be far worse than taking it. Militia in Mecklenburg and Rowan counties cut up every foraging party and courier the British sent out, so thoroughly that Cornwallis could not get reliable word from his own outposts. His army sat in a hostile county eating badly and learning nothing. 🔥

Then word came of Kings Mountain, and on October 12 he left. British officers wrote about that country afterward in language that stuck, and Charlotte has called itself the hornet's nest ever since, which makes it one of the few civic nicknames anywhere that started as a complaint from the losing side.

08/21/2026

One of the men who signed the United States Constitution had already been chased out of Boston Harbor, sent to Europe as a spy, and captured at sea. He was a doctor from Edenton. 🖋️

Hugh Williamson was one of the most improbably qualified people in the room in Philadelphia in 1787. He had trained as a Presbyterian minister, taught mathematics, studied medicine at Utrecht, published papers on comets and on the climate, and been elected to the Royal Society. He was standing on a Boston wharf in December 1773 and watched the tea go into the water, then carried the first account of it to London and told the Privy Council to their faces that the colonies would fight.

He came to Edenton in 1777 and made himself useful in ways that had nothing to do with politics at first. As surgeon general of the North Carolina militia he insisted on inoculation, clean quarters and dry clothing, and the results were startling. He is generally credited with keeping the state's troops healthier than almost any other force in the war, at a time when disease killed far more soldiers than muskets did. 🩺

At the Constitutional Convention he spoke more often than most delegates and did a great deal of the unglamorous committee work that made the compromises hold. Then he went home and argued the thing through ratification here, which took North Carolina two tries and a great deal of persuading.

He spent his last years in New York writing a history of this state, which he clearly considered his own even though he was born in Pennsylvania.