This content is from the North Carolina Gazetteer, edited by William S. Powell and Michael Hill. Copyright © 2010 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.

Some place names included in The North Carolina Gazetteer contain terms that are considered offensive.

"The North Carolina Gazetteer is a geographical dictionary in which an attempt has been made to list all of the geographic features of the state in one alphabet. It is current, and it is historical as well. Many features and places that no longer exist are included; many towns and counties for which plans were made but which never materialized are also included. Some names appearing on old maps may have been imaginary, but many of them also appear in this gazetteer.

Each entry is located according to the county in which it is found. I have not felt obliged to keep entries uniform. The altitude of a place, the date of incorporation of a city or town, may appear in the beginning of one entry and at the end of another. Some entries may appear more complete than others. I have included whatever information I could find. If there is no comment on the origin or meaning of a name, it is because the information was not available. In some cases, however, resort to an unabridged dictionary may suggest the meaning of many names."

--From The North Carolina Gazetteer, 1st edition, preface by William S. Powell

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Place Description
Old Field

an area in what is now Beaufort County between Pungo and Pamlico Rivers; shown on the Ogilby map, 1671.

Old Field Bald Mountain

on Ashe-Watauga county line. Alt. 4,939. Named for muster ground and drill field used by Col. Benjamin Cleveland during the Revolution.

Old Field Branch

rises in NE Ashe County and flows SE into Poison Branch.

Old Field Creek

rises in N Caldwell County and flows NE into Buffalo Creek.

Old Field Top Mountain

W Haywood County between Plott Balsams and Mingus Ridge. Alt. 5,820. Sometimes called Plott's Old Field Mountain.

Old Fields of Toe

See Newland.

Old Fields Township

W Wilson County.

Old Ford

See Mineola.

Old Ford Swamp

rises in NW Beaufort County and flows W to join Snoad Branch in forming Aggie Run.

Old Fort

town in W McDowell County on Catawba River. Alt. 1,438. Inc. 1872 as Catawba Vale by a northern land company that expected to develop a city on the Davidson plantation, which it had purchased the previous year. Name changed in 1873 to Old Fort, the name by which the community had been known since 1828 or earlier, when a post office existed there. Named for Davidson's Fort, erected in 1776 by troops under the command of Gen. Griffith Rutherford, who led expedition against the Cherokee Indians.