Just think about this...

New Bern's 300th birthday is coming up in 2010. Christophe deGraffenried of Bern, Switzerland arrived in New Bern in 1710. His German and Swiss settlers were eager for a new life in America. Queen Anne of England was eager to get the German Palatine refugees out of England. She'd offered them sanctuary from the French Catholic King Louis who was destroying their Protestant settlements in the rich farmland of Palatine Germany. So many came that London was overrun, English citizens were in an uproar....sounds familiar doesn't it?
DeGraffenreid had read an (exaggerated) report of rich silver mines in the Carolinas in a book written by John Lawson a year or so earlier. Lawson, an English adventurer and explorer, traveled throughout the Carolinas early in the 1700's and wrote an immensely popular report of his adventures. Lawson lived for a year in a cabin with his bulldog on the peninsula where the Trent River meets the Neuse, near where Lawson's Creek is located probably. This (now)in downtown New Bern. He lived peacefully among the Neusiok Indian tribe in their town named Chattawka. How Lawson imagined there were silver mines, we'll never know. But the Swiss DeGraffenried was determined to start a prosperous settlement here...based on a fallacy.
So New Bern was settled by an ill-informed aristocrat with poor hard-working religious refugees; brought to a place where an aggressive Indian tribe, the Tuscarora, held all the territory. It was a recipe for trouble. And trouble came pretty quickly. In September of 1712, the Indians attacked throughout the entire eastern North Carolina seaboard without any warning.