Thornbury has storied history

Thornbury Plantation has been in existence for 180 years, but the original land grant from King George III of England totaled 18,000 acres.

Steve Burgwyn, one of the current owners, said. “The first plantation house was built by my great-great-great-great grandfather. Its name was the Burgwyn House, but it burned down.”

Steve Burgwyn came into possession of the land through marriage.

“His two sons, Henry King Burgwyn and Thomas Burgwyn, began clearing the land during the mid-1800s,” Steve Burgwyn said.

Henry King Burgwyn, one of Steve’s great-great-great uncles, won fame during the War Between the States as “The Boy Colonel,” leader of North Carolina’s 26th Regiment. He was killed during the battle of Gettysburg.

“One of Henry King’s brothers was my great-great grandfather,” Steve Burgwyn said, “and that’s how we came to inherit this land.”

The plantation originally was one of the famed Occoneechee Neck Low Grounds plantations.

“The land wasn’t of much use to start with because it was in the low ground, and the property got flooded every year by the Roanoke River,” he said.

The floods ended when the Roanoke River lakes — Kerr Lake in the mid-1950s and later Lake Gaston and Roanoke Rapids — were built. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers helped by regulating water flow to end lowland flooding and helped striped bass spawn, a cooperative project pushed by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission in the 1970s and 1980s.

“We were lucky,” Burgwyn said. “When the floods ended, we could plant crops at some of the richest flood-plain bottom land in the world.”

Editor’s note: This article is part of the Northhampton’s Rut Central feature in the November issue of North Carolina Sportsman. Digital editions can now be downloaded right to your computer or smartphone.