Although a native of Norwich, Connecticut, Waightstill Avery (1743—1821) moved to North Carolina after attending school at Princeton, New Jersey, and studying law in Maryland. Of English-Puritan background, he allied himself with the Scots-Irish of Mecklenburg County in politics. A member of the committee which drafted the Mecklenburg resolves in 1775, he held many other positions, civil and military, during the Revolution: delegate to the North Carolina congress, member of the council of safety, participant in the drafting of the new state constitution, negotiator with the Cherokee during Griffith Rutherford's expedition in 1776 and for the Long Island treaty in 1777, attorney general of North Carolina, and colonel of the Jones County militia. In 1781 he moved to his “Swan Ponds” estate in Burke County, his residence for the remainder of his life.
