Dispatches From the Parks: Moores Creek National Battlefield

My final destination on my recent trip through North Carolina and Tennessee ended up being Moores Creek National Battlefield. The little known park was established in 1926, and its purpose is to preserve one of the first battles in the American Revolutionary War as Scottish Highlanders and Loyalists were ambushed by Patriot forces in North Carolina. If you are fortunate enough to visit this park you will learn just how integral this battle was to the larger war effort as it settled North Carolina as a major hub for Patriot forces for the rest of the war. 

I began my trip here with a quick picnic after a long drive. While the park does have a designated picnic area a bit away from the visitor center and trails, the park does have multiple picnic benches laid out in front of the visitor center. So this is definitely a picnic friendly park. Your first experience in the visitor center as you walk in is listening to some timely music playing throughout the building. It’s a lovely touch that I wish more visitor centers did. The only other one that I can think of that does this is the visitor center at George Washington Birthplace National Monument in Virginia. The exhibits in the visitor center are of apiece with the many other visitor centers preserving Revolutionary War era history in the Carolinas. They do a great job of showcasing why the southern campaign during the war was so important.

I ended up arriving at the park at the same time as a large school group so I was a bit limited in which trails I could do outside the visitor center. The park has two main trails: the History Trail and the Tarheel Trail. I wanted to do both, but ended up not doing the smaller Tarheel Trail. The History Trail seems to be the real highlight of the park anyway. The hike is only about a mile long, and it brings you through a surprising variety of landscapes. One of the first attractions on the trail is a plant bed that has venus flytraps. The current crop did not look anything like the typical venus flytrap so I didn’t take any pictures of them. Much of the first third of the trail goes through a typical southern plain, but you can still see the earthworks from the battle scarring the landscape. It’s stunning that these can be so well preserved. The middle section of the trail goes through the park’s eponymous creek. Many of the waysides talk about how the loyalist faction leading into the battle had intel that the water was upto six feet deep, and the creek definitely looks that way. It’s surprisingly large for a creek. Fortunately, you get to go over it through a boardwalk. The final third of the trail weaves through multiple monuments and audio waysides. The audio waysides actually work, which normally isn’t the case in many parks in the National Park Service.

Moores Creek National Battlefield is a nice day trip through some lesser known American history.