Elizabethtown—Town and county seat, located in central Bladen County. Altitude 121 feet. Established 1773, chartered 1843, and incorporated in 1895. Named either for Queen Elizabeth I of England or for the sweetheart of Isaac Jones, on whose land the town was laid out. In the Battle of Elizabethtown, August 27, 1781, Whigs broke Tory power in Bladen County by driving them into Tory Hole, a deep ravine along the banks of Cape Fear River in the middle of town.
Abbottsburg—Town in southwest Bladen County. Incorporated 1903…Altitude approximately 99 feet. Named for Joseph C. Abbott (1825-1881), president of the Cape Fear Building Company there. Even Abbott’s enemies would often cheerfully concede that Abbottsburg was perhaps the most promising economic development in southeastern North Carolina. Abbott’s later years were unhappy ones. His Cape Fear Building Company was ruined by two converging developments. first he and some competing lumberman exhausted the forest resources in easy reach of Abbottsburg, and then, before he could relocate his plant, the panic of 1873 struck and caused a $100,000 contraction in his assets. He became bankrupt and Abbottsburg a ghost town, according to NCpedia by William McKee Evans, 1979.
Battle of Brown’s Marsh—The Battle of Brown’s Marsh was the last in a long line of military encounters in North Carolina at the end of the Revolutionary War, following loyalist colonel David Fanning’s capture of Whig governor Thomas Burke at Hillsborough on 12 September, 1781. The precise site of the battle, as well as its exact date, is currently unknown, but it likely took place sometime between 28 September and 2 October, 1781 near present-day Clarkton in Bladen County.
NCpedia is interesting reading. Much work has been contributed by Jason Bordeaux, a Bladen County native, as well as others.
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