Copyright Notice: This article is from the Encyclopedia of North Carolina edited by William S. Powell. Copyright © 2006 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. For personal use and not for further distribution. Please submit permission requests for other use directly to the publisher.
Cattle drives, made famous in western states such as Texas and Oklahoma during the nineteenth century, were actually undertaken in North Carolina before the end of the colonial period. Tens of thousands of cattle every year were driven along roads and paths from North Carolina to seaports such as Charleston or Norfolk, to Philadelphia, and to New York City by cattle drovers. The cattle were gathered from the forests and meadows into areas called "cow pens," branded, and walked to market.
Image Credit:
Beef Cattle, Temple Farm, 1932. Image available from North Carolina State University Libraries. Available from http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/ua023_007-003-bx0005-007-006 (accessed September 10, 2012).
Templeton, Lee Plummer. "Cattle Drives." NCpedia. State Library of NC. 2006. https://www.ncpedia.org/cattle-drives.