TAR HEEL — Dozens of people turned out for the 240th anniversary of the Battle of Elizabethtown held at Purdie Cemetery near Tar Heel on Sunday evening.
The event was held in the cemetery where Col. James Richardson is buried. He built a home on the Harmony Hall Plantation Village in 1760.
The battle took place Aug. 27, 1781, and involved deception, a naked swim across the river, and the surrender of 300 to 400 Tories under the command of John Slingsby and David Godden to the Bladen County Whig militia of about 60 to 70 men led by Cols. Thomas Robeson Jr. and Thomas Brown.
Sunday’s remembrance, which came two days after a ceremony in downtown Elizabethtown, was orchestrated by Sunday Allen and Terry Smith and the two agreed that history is important for the world to know about.
“We don’t do this enough anymore,” Allen said.
The East Bladen High School teacher offered her students a full test grade if they showed up to the event.
“Our history club has been sitting dormant for the last year and I know I’m so anxious to get it rolling again,” Allen said. “I want kids to get kids interested in going again. I’m always telling my kids to learn the history around them.”
Allen said the value of coming to events such as this one is knowing history and realizing people didn’t just plop down here. She added that what has happened in history is important because it makes people responsible for where they are today.
“We can’t go back and erase the wrongs that happened,” Allen said.
Smith was the main orchestrator of the event, setting things up for the first time at the cemetery.
“The importance of hosting this event,” Smith said, “is so that we recognize the sacrifices that were made in our country that we would not be a free county today or that we would not be the greatest country on Earth that provides refuge, education and aid far more than any nation that was ever created.”
Smith alluded to the fact that some stories have never been told.
On Friday in downtown Elizabethtown, Mayor Sylvia Campbell and others laid a wreath at the site of a state historical marker. Smith gave a brief explanation of the past basically while being in the middle of the road. She reminded people that freedom isn’t free.
The Battle of Elizabethtown is generally recognized as the Cape Fear region’s second-most important battle, next to the famous Battle of Moores Creek Bridge in Pender County. The loss in Tory Hole, as it is now known, was soon followed by Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown in October, and Loyalist forces abandoning Wilmington and the entire Cape Fear region for South Carolina.
The N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, in recounting the battle, said the Whigs hid out in Duplin County and devised their plan with the help of a spy selling eggs in Elizabethtown. They marched through the night, swam the river naked, then attacked from multiple angles. They faked calling out Patriot commander names to get the Tories to believe there were more forces than in reality, eventually driving the occupants of the eight-year-old town into a ravine beside the river.