The Geology of Moores Creek National Battlefield, North Carolina

Moores Creek National Battlefield lies along Moores Creek near the town of Currie, northwest of Wilmington in Pender County, North Carolina. It was established as a national military park on June 2, 1926, and renamed a national battlefield on September 8, 1980.

The park covers about 35 hectares (88 acres) and preserves the site of the Battle of Moores Creek Bridge, fought on February 27, 1776, between North Carolina Patriots and Highlander Loyalists on the banks of the creek. The battle is widely regarded as the first decisive Patriot victory of the Revolutionary War. It kept the Loyalist armies from joining forces, delayed a full British invasion of the South, advanced the revolutionary cause there, and led North Carolina to cast the first vote for American independence at the Continental Congress.

Geologic setting

The park lies in the Atlantic Coastal Plain, a region of Cretaceous and younger rock and sediment whose flat land contrasts with the hills and ridges of the Piedmont and the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west.

A striking feature of the Coastal Plain is a series of marine terraces representing distinct transgressive–regressive sequences. These old shorelines step down in elevation and in age toward the Atlantic coast. In most places the terraces lie flat and run parallel to the coast, except near large river systems such as the Cape Fear River, which Moores Creek drains into.

Two units underlie the park: the Pleistocene Socastee Formation and Holocene deposits. Both are loose to partly consolidated sands, silts and clays that came originally from the Appalachian Mountains.

Part of the digital geologic map of Moores Creek National Battlefield from the Geologic Resources Inventory. National Park Service.

Maps and inventories

The park's page is part of the NPS Geodiversity Atlas, which gathers information on each park's rocks, sediments, landforms, soils and physical processes to support education, geoconservation and management. The Geologic Resources Inventory, which produces digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks, has products available for Moores Creek, and a Soil Resources Inventory has been completed for the park.

Image from the National Park Service's page.

Sources

• National Park Service, "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Moores Creek National Battlefield, North Carolina." https://www.nps.gov/articles/nps-geodiversity-atlas-moores-creek-national-battlefield-north-carolina.htm
• The atlas page cites Thornberry-Ehrlich (2006) and National Park Service (2012, 2016).
• Geologic Resources Inventory products: https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/SavedSearch/Profile/3020; Soil Resources Inventory: https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/SavedSearch/Profile/3067
• The Park Service's page gives the park's distance from Wilmington as "approximately 8 km (20 mi)," two figures that do not match, so this page gives neither.