History

The Town of Troutman's roots go back to the 1750's, when immigrants from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland first arrived in the area. The lack of free land in those regions, and the abundant supply of free land in these parts, motivated them.

They cleared farms for themselves out of the thick forests, built log cabins, barns, and corrals, raised crops and livestock, traded furs, foodstuffs, and tools, built churches and schools, and raised their families. In doing so, they created the first wagon roads between their widely dispersed settlements. These typically followed the old Indian trails, which crossed rivers and streams at shallow fords.

In 1778, a young man arrived in this area, along with his widowed mother. John Jacob Trautman (original spelling) was eleven years old; his father had just passed away that year. The family had been living near Rockwell, in Rowan County. Jacob and his mother came here to homestead anew

During the first half of the 1800's, small farms and settlements continued to spread throughout the Carolinas, connected by meandering wagon and horse trails. In the first few decades, the very first railroad tracks and steam engines appeared. These dangerous and dirty contraptions frightened the horses, delighted the children, and belched smoke and cinders and arson wherever they went. In fact, the body of laws dealing with compensation for property damage in North Carolina all stem from countless lawsuits brought against the railroads over fire damage to crops and buildings caused by passing steam locomotives.

The tradeoff was that trains carried more freight and passengers, much faster and farther, than muleskinners and their creaking freight wagons could ever hope to. Second only to the cotton gin, trains were vital to the cotton industry, quickly moving countless bulky bales to distant textile mills.

Nonetheless, freight wagons pulled by draft animals would remain a staple of the North Carolina landscape right into the Twentieth Century. In the mid-1800's, especially in Western North Carolina, wagons were how you moved your harvest, or your products, to market.

By 1905, when the residents of Troutman petitioned the State Legislature to grant them an official Town Charter, the old era was fading rapidly. Horses and mules and wagons were still how you got around, but there was change in the air.

In 1905, the news was still full of talk about the Wright Brothers, and horseless carriages, and a curious new invention called radio. In 1905, the tractor and the teabag had just been invented, and most people thought they looked like really useful items.

It was a rather amazing time to be alive. So many new things were becoming possible. Various tinkerers around the country simply sat down at their workbenches and thought up entirely new things. The air conditioner. The vacuum cleaner. They planned to sell them by the hundreds, maybe by the thousands, to anyone who wanted one. Southern Power Company (now Duke Power Company) was formed in 1904 to provide electricity for the textile mills of our region, and for all these new gadgets.