Ever wondered how North Carolina got its nickname “The Tar Heel State”? Its origins are not totally certain, but have clear ties to the longleaf pine, a species so revered by NC that it’s in the state’s official toast and has its own award: the Order of the Long Leaf Pine.
Throughout the 1800s, longleaf pine trees fueled NC’s economy with tar, pitch, rosin + turpentine, which were used by the naval industry to waterproof + protect wooden ships. Our longleaf pines were so plentiful that at one point, North Carolina had the largest naval industry in the country.
So what’s that got to do with Tar Heels? At the start of the Civil War in 1865, North Carolina was producing nearly 100% of turpentine in the United States. Sticky, tacky + messy, tar and its related products were hard to shake once you came into contact with it, and workers who distilled turpentine inevitably got it on themselves, including on their feet. It was not uncommon for the nickname to be used as an insult to imply that folks working it were uneducated and low class.
A popular legend also suggests that the Tar Heel name comes from Civil War battles, where “the soldiers of North Carolina stuck to their bloody work as if they had tar on their heels.” Interestingly, some historians also credit this as the time folks started to reclaim the term and use it as an expression of state pride.
While it lacks the glamour of more straightforward nicknames like “The Garden State” and “The Peach State,” we love how the name sticks, because it pays homage to what makes North Carolina so great: the people.
