North Carolina's Name and the Lost Province of Carolana

Before there was a North Carolina, there was Carolana, a province King Charles I granted in 1630 to his attorney general, Sir Robert Heath. The name honored the king, and it outlived Heath’s grant.

Carolana, on paper

Francis L. Hawks, in the 1858 second volume of his History of North Carolina, describes what Heath got: all the land between the thirty-first and thirty-sixth parallels, running from the coast “westward for more than one thousand miles.” That, he says, “included the larger portion of North Carolina.” Hawks says the province was called Carolana. Heath later handed it to Lord Maltravers, who became the Earl of Arundel.

Did anybody actually settle it? Hawks isn’t sure. In 1639 the king told Virginia’s leaders to help Maltravers “in seating Carolina,” and, going by Virginia records that a later historian cited, it seems a man named William Hawley turned up there as “governor of Carolina.” Hawks thinks a few short-lived settlements are “not improbable.” But the grant was later thrown out on the grounds that its purposes had never been carried out.

There’s an older Charles in the story, too. Jean Ribault, a French captain, planted a short-lived colony at Port Royal in 1562, in what’s now South Carolina, and Edward McCrady, a Charleston lawyer who wrote an 1897 history of South Carolina, says it “gave to the whole region the name of Carolina in honor of Charles IX of France.” Henry Gannett, who traced American place names for the U.S. Geological Survey in 1905, tells it differently: Ribault’s name “never came into general use and soon disappeared.” Gannett dates the name to about 1628, when it was “applied definitely to that part of the country lying between Virginia and Florida, having been given in honor of Charles I of England.” He quotes an old manuscript in London: “1629-30, Feb. 10. The Attorney-General is prayed to grant by Patent 2 Degrees in Carolina.” McCrady adds the backstory. As early as February 10, 1629, he writes, French Protestant refugees in England were talking with Charles I about a colony there, and Heath’s patent “grew out of the proposals” they made.

Carolana and Carolina

The old grant didn’t go quietly. McCrady quotes Dr. Daniel Coxe, who claimed the Heath patent after it had passed through several hands and wrote about it in 1721: “Carolana and Carolina are two distinct tho’ bordering Provinces, the east of Carolana joyning to the west of Carolina.” By then the Carolana claim had been squeezed west of the settled part of Carolina, out toward the Mississippi. McCrady thinks Coxe drew the line that way to stay out of a fight with the colonies already there. You could say the spelling with an “a” got sent inland.

The colonies that lasted came from a new grant. In 1663, McCrady says, King Charles II gave “the province of Carolina” to eight of his supporters, and that same year the Heath patent was declared void. A 1666 pamphlet written to draw settlers, which Hawks reprints, gave the new king the credit: Carolina was “so called in honor of his sacred majesty that now is, Charles the Second, whom God preserve.” Gannett squares it this way. The 1663 province was named for the reigning king, “and thus the old name given in honor of Charles I was retained.”

Which Charles was it, then? The English trail is the better documented one. Of the records Gannett and McCrady quote, the oldest one with the name in it is that London manuscript of 1629–30, and neither of them shows anyone calling the region Carolina between Ribault’s time and then. But that manuscript doesn’t say which Charles the name was for, so you can’t call it settled.

North and east of Cape Fear

So where does the “North” come in? Carolina was one province, but it had two settled ends. In 1689, McCrady writes, Philip Ludwell was made governor of “all that part of the province of Carolina that lies north and east of Cape Fear.” Governors of the southern part had commissions for the land “south and west of Cape Fear.” Around this time, McCrady says, “the titles of North and South Carolina now began to be used in some official papers,” though “there was no such division of the province at this time.” In other words, the “North” in North Carolina showed up while the province’s two ends were still being described on paper as north and east of Cape Fear or south and west of it, and the “Carolina” goes back to a king named Charles. Two kings, or three, depending on how you count.

Sources & further reading

• Francis L. Hawks, History of North Carolina, vol. 2 (1858). The 1666 pamphlet A Brief Description of the Province of Carolina, reprinted: “so called in honor of his sacred majesty that now is, Charles the Second, whom God preserve” (p. 37); Charles I’s grant of 1630 to Sir Robert Heath, “his attorney-general,” from the coast “westward for more than one thousand miles” (p. 69), between the thirty-first and thirty-sixth parallels, which “included the larger portion of North Carolina”; the name Carolana; Heath’s assignment to Lord Maltravers, Earl of Arundel; the 1639 order to assist “in seating Carolina”; William Hawley, “governor of Carolina”; settlements “not improbable”; the patent declared void because its purposes had never been fulfilled (p. 70).
• Edward McCrady, The History of South Carolina under the Proprietary Government, 1670–1719 (1897). McCrady as “a member of the bar of Charleston” (title page); Ribault’s settlement at Port Royal “gave to the whole region the name of Carolina in honor of Charles IX of France” (p. 48); the French Protestant refugees and Charles I, “as early as the 10th of February, 1629,” and the Heath patent that “grew out of the proposals” (p. 49); Daniel Coxe’s 1721 description, “Carolana and Carolina are two distinct tho’ bordering Provinces”; the claim limited to the country west of the settled part of Carolina, “embracing the Mississippi,” and McCrady’s view that Coxe’s admission was meant to avoid conflict with the later grants; the Heath patent declared void by the council on August 12, 1663 (p. 55); Charles II’s patent of 1663 granting the eight Lords Proprietors “the province of Carolina” (p. 56); Ludwell, governor of the part “north and east of Cape Fear,” the titles of North and South Carolina “now began to be used in some official papers,” and the footnote on commissions “south and west of Cape Fear” (p. 235).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), pp. 69–70. Ribault’s Carolina, for Charles IX of France, which “never came into general use and soon disappeared”; the name “applied definitely” about 1628 “in honor of Charles I of England”; the manuscript of “1629-30, Feb. 10”; the province of 1663, “named in honor of the reigning king, and thus the old name given in honor of Charles I was retained.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists North Carolina’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1027616).