Yancey County, North Carolina

Yancey County is a county located in the U.S. state of North Carolina. As of the 2010 census, the population was 17,818. Its county seat is Burnsville.

This land was in inhabited by the Cherokee prior to European settlement. The Appalachian Mountains region belonged to the Cherokee Indians.

History

Independent and sturdy Scottish, English, and Scotch-Irish settlers of the Carolina frontier had crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains and settled the Toe River Valley by the mid-18th century. In the year 1796, one of the early land speculators, John Gray Blount, paid for 326,640 acres (1322 km²) of land, a portion of which later became Yancey County, N.C.

In December 1833, the General Assembly established a new western county, named Yancey, from sections of Burke and Buncombe Counties. Yancey County was named in honor of one of North Carolina's most distinguished statesmen, Bartlett Yancey, of Caswell County. As a U.S. Congressman (1813–1817) and as speaker of the N.C. Senate (1817–1827), he was instrumental in many accomplishments that benefited the state, including the creation of an education fund that was the beginning of the N.C. Public School System. He was an advocate of correcting the inequality in representation in the General Assembly by the creation of new western counties; but he died on August 30, 1828, over five years before the General Assembly created a new county named in his honor. In Yancey's boundaries looms Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the Eastern U.S., at 6,684 feet (2037 m) above sea level.