NC Governors - Place of Birth

For some reason, I’m obsessed with North Carolina’s governors. Apart from NC being my home state, I’m also a huge history and politics buff.

I’m also a huge presidential buff. I’ve got multiple books on them as a whole – histories, trivia, even travel books …

I guess I figure governors are the closet thing at the state level. Now, there are bios of individual governors (though most of these are pretty obscure). What’s surprising, though, is how little info there is out there comparable to the stuff I have on the presidents. 

So, why not just roll my own?

You know, I could probably get a couple of posts out of this. But, heck, let’s start with where these guys were born.

Methodology & Results

There have been 67 governors of the state of North Carolina. To tell you the truth, all I did was simply look at what counties they were born in, then throw those on a map:

Key

Governors born outside NC:

• Black ring – outside US
• Red ring – Confederate states
• Purple ring – border states
• Blue ring – Union states

Governors born inside NC:

• Red dot – statehood to 1800 (post-Colonial)
• Green dot – 1800 to Civil War (antebellum)
• Light blue dot – Civil War to 1900 (Civil War, Reconstruction & Redemption)
• Blue dot – 1900 to 1973 (Democratic lock)
• Purple – 1973 to present (mixed elections)
• Black dot – from multiple eras

Both

The size of the ring denotes how many governors have been from that county

Interpretation

• 22% of governors have been from outside NC, with 9% from Virginia alone (& 4% from outside the US)
• Rockingham has provided the most with 5, Buncombe the 2nd most with 3
• 6 others have each supplied 2 (Alamance, Wayne, Halifax, Bertie, Mecklenburg & Edgecombe)

• Overall, there’s a pretty good distribution across the state
• The far west and the northern foothills are the only areas that have really missed out

• No real patterns historically
• That said, the antebellum era seemed to go straight across the state, from Washington County to Burke
• For some reason, there were a lot of governors from counties along the SC border in the 1st three-quarters of the 20th Century