On this day 250 years ago in North Carolina, Royal Governor Josiah Martin of North Carolina ordered HMS Cruizer to sail up the Cape Fear River past the ruins of Fort Johnston to capture Wilmington. The ship and its landing parties were driven back by fire from New Hanover County militia commanded by Irish immigrant Col. William Purviance on both sides of the river.

Sources: https://www.carolana.com/NC/Revolution/revolution_fort_johnston_3.html; https://revolutionarywar.us/year-1776/; https://revolutionarywar.us/year-1776/

On this day 250 years ago in the Revolution, at Eltham plantation, Virginia Delegate Burwell Bassett wrote to his brother-in-law George Washington to report on the status of the War in Virginia:

Lord Dunmore is at last stopt in his carreer the particulars of which you must have seen in the papers3 he is still confind on board his ship whare he suffers much for fresh provision and other necessarys I am just released from the Convention which set seven weaks they have agreed to raise six new Regiments & a Battallion of five hundred men for the Eastern shoore

Source: “Burwell Bassett to George Washington, 27 January 1776,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-03-02-0143. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 3, 1 January 1776 – 31 March 1776, ed. Philander D. Chase. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988, pp. 198–199.]