Twenty-seven miles west of modern-day Salisbury, North Carolina, Fort Dobbs is located in Iredell County. In 1756, colonial Governor Arthur Dobbs commissioned the construction of the fort to protect Piedmont settlements during the French and Indian War (1754–1763). At that time, Fort Dobbs was North Carolina’s only frontier fort; all others were on the coast.
Captain Hugh Waddell led forty-six soldiers in constructing Fort Dobbs so that colonists could be protected from possible French, Cherokee, and Catawba attacks. Francis Brown and Richard Caswell were sent by the legislature to inspect Fort Dobbs in December 1756. They reported that the fort was a “good and Substantial Building . . . it contains three floors, and there may be discharged from each floor at one time and the same time about one hundred Musketts.”
Only one battle occurred at Fort Dobbs. On February 27, 1760, seventy Cherokee attacked Captain Waddell and his forty-six men. According to Waddell’s account, only two of his men were wounded, and only one killed; the Cherokee, however, lost ten to twelve men. Toward the end of the French and Indian War, the British focused their campaign in the East, and protection in the frontier was deemed unnecessary. In 1763, when the war ended, Britain had regained control in the colonies. By 1764, Fort Dobbs was abandoned and dismantled.
In 1909 the Daughters of the American Revolution saved the site. It became a State Historic Site after archaeologists investigated the fort in the 1960s and 1970s. In 2003 the Friends of Fort Dobbs, a nonprofit organization, began the project of reconstructing the fort, working with a variety of specialists, including archaeologist Larry Babits. The rebuilt fort opened in September 2019.
Today, re-enactors relive annually the battle of Fort Dobbs and tell of the fort’s historical significance. Fort Dobbs is the only historic site in North Carolina commemorating the French and Indian War.