Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/268

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traded with Virginia, Cape Fear with Barbadoes and Charleston. The Scotch-Irish of the Piedmont country were better acquainted with their brethren in Pennsylvania, and in nearer sympathy with them, than with the Scotch on the upper Cape Fear and lower Yadkin. The little settlement of Maryland Churchmen in Rowan kept up communication with their kins-*folk in St. Mary's County at the mouth of the Potomac, and their Lutheran neighbors sent back to Hanover for teachers and ministers, and had their services in the German tongue until well on in the nineteenth century.

Not only was there no metropolis—for the first fifty years there were no towns. The Palatines and Swiss at the confluence of the Neuse and the Trent laid out the little town of Newbern, and the Moravians, soon after 1750, began their town of Salem, but nowhere else in the Province was a town made the basis of the settlement. The Anglo-Saxon self-reliance and freedom never showed itself more self-reliant and free than in the unconscious daring which spread over thousands of square miles of savage wilderness with never a centre of strength or of succor provided against a time of danger.