<P> Bath, the oldest town in North Carolina, was the first nominal capital from 1705 until 1722, when Edenton took over the role, but the colony had no permanent institutions of government until their establishment at the new capital New Bern in 1743 . Raleigh became capital of North Carolina in 1792 . </P> <P> The colony grew rapidly from a population of 100,000 in 1752 to 200,000 in 1765 . By 1760, enslaved Africans constituted one - quarter of the population and were concentrated along the coast . </P> <P> In the late eighteenth century, the tide of immigration to North Carolina from Virginia and Pennsylvania began to swell . The Scots - Irish (Ulster Protestants) from what is today Northern Ireland were the largest immigrant group from the British Isles to the colonies before the Revolution . In total, English indentured servants, who arrived mostly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, comprised the majority of English settlers prior to the Revolution . On the eve of the American Revolution, North Carolina was the fastest - growing British colony in North America . The small family farms of the Piedmont contrasted sharply with the plantation economy of the coastal region, where wealthy planters had established a slave society, growing tobacco and rice with slave labor . </P> <P> Differences in the settlement patterns of eastern and western North Carolina, or the low country and uplands, affected the political, economic, and social life of the state from the eighteenth until the twentieth century . The Tidewater in eastern North Carolina was settled chiefly by immigrants from rural England and the Scottish Highlands . The upcountry of western North Carolina was settled chiefly by Scots - Irish, English and German Protestants, the so - called "cohee". During the Revolutionary War, the English and Highland Scots of eastern North Carolina tended to remain loyal to the British Crown, because of longstanding business and personal connections with Great Britain . The English, Welsh, Scots - Irish and German settlers of western North Carolina tended to favor American independence from Britain . </P>

Settlers of the piedmont region of north carolina