(I’m adding on to the question/answer above my comment!!)
In 1663, to bring order to Albemarle, King Charles II gave the region south of Virginia -- which he called "Carolina" after the Latin version of his own name -- to a group of his friends and political supporters. Known as the Lords Proprietors, they ruled the land from the Virginia border all the way to Florida like junior kings. But Carolina, like other colonies before it, was harder to manage than they expected. The men who had moved south from Virginia didn't think much of their new landlords, and weren't interested in being governed from London. In Carolina's first fifty years, the colony faced violent rebellion, attack by the Spanish, war with Indians, hurricanes, droughts, and pirates.
Despite all these problems, Carolina grew. The Lords Proprietors offered freedom of religion to all Christians -- something not possible in England -- and the colony attracted Anglicans, Quakers, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, and people of other faiths from many countries -- England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, and Moravia. Tens of thousands more came from Africa, as slaves. After two bloody wars, the remaining Indians of eastern North Carolina left the colony, joined into small bands on tiny reservations, or assimilated into colonial society. Settlers swept across the coastal plain and Piedmont. The colony was taken over by the king and split into two, North Carolina and South Carolina.