I'm currently reading The Civil War in North Carolina by John G. Barrett, which I am enjoying greatly. A couple of nights ago, I ran across a passage that referenced Columbia, NC -- the small town in Eastern North Carolina where my family is from:

Columbia, a small village in Tyrrell County, also felt the "Christian" wrath of Burnside's soldiers, but to a lesser degree than Winton. In early March, six companies of the Sixth New Hampshire were sent to the area. No Confederates were found, but a rumor that the local militia was to be called out was used by the New Englanders as reason enough to plunder the town. To the delight of the Negroes, the whipping post was torn down. Then the soldiers broke open the jail, clerk's office, "and the Dwelling Houses of such as were gone from home." In the abandoned homes the soldiers partook freely of available liquor supplies which made "them ripe for more mischief." The ransacking of at least one more home and the depleting of all smokehouses followed.

After reading that, I immediately went to the index of the book to see if Columbia made any other appearances. It didn't, although Tyrrell County got two more mentions, both of which were very brief. Anyway, it was pretty interesting to see portions of Eastern NC where I have family ties show up in this book.

As I already mentioned, I'm very much enjoying this book. I'm about 100 pages into the approximate 400 pages of the book. It is really doing a great job of exploring, in detail, the involvement of North Carolina in the US Civil War. Apparently, in 1963, when this book was published, there was no work that looked at how the US Civil War affected North Carolina, so Barrett wrote this to fill the void. I've noticed that Barrett has also written a book about Sherman's march through the Carolinas, which I may want to pick up after finishing this one.