- [Narrator] What if the stories of the American Revolution that you grew up with, those neat rows of red and blue, are not what it looked like in your neck of the woods?

In the Carolina Backcountry, the war wasn't a distant thing fought by strangers.

It was personal, fought on familiar back roads between people who'd known each other for years, and sometimes it was rooted in conflicts that went back further than the Revolution itself.

This is the story of two of those men, both named John, both living in the same stretch of country in North Carolina's Piedmont.

They were neighbors, but they fought on opposite sides.

So we dug into their stories and worked with a group of people who are still piecing them together.

- People suffered on both sides, and both sides were at fault in some way.

It just is not as clean as people wanna make.

- [Narrator] From pension records and old deeds, from Facebook groups and family bibles, and from the documents that ordinary people leave behind, just waiting to be discovered.

And the way their stories intertwined shows why many historians consider the American Revolution to be our country's first civil war.

This is "Homegrown History."

To understand how neighbors ended up on opposite sides of the American Revolution, we gotta go back a decade to the heart of the North Carolina Backcountry and a conflict most people outside this state have never heard of.

- This house here at Alamance Battleground is a great example of how folks here in Backcountry North Carolina lived at the time of this battle.

- [Narrator] This is Lisa Cox, an historic interpreter at Alamance Battleground.

10 years before the Revolutionary War, Backcountry settlers in this area organized and protested against corrupt Crown-appointed officials, and that all came to a head right here.

- Folks started moving here from the north.

They were farm families.

They were moving here for land.

It was affordable and it was available.

Life was going pretty well for 'em until they started having issues with their local officials.

I'm talking about some of the judges, lawyers, clerk of court's office, register of deed's office, the sheriffs.

They were just basically using their offices for their own personal gain.

- [Narrator] Take Colonel Edmund Fanning, who served as Orange County's Register of Deeds.

When he was convicted of charging settlers excessive fees, he was barely punished for it, and later promoted.

So these farmers organized.

They called themselves the Regulators, and they started with petitions.

[upbeat music] - "You know, we're not trying to overthrow the government.

We just want accountable and just government."

Keep in mind, these farmers were not against the King, they were not against Parliament, and they were not against the rule of law.

They were wanting the rule of law to be followed.

- [Narrator] One of those regulators was a doctor named John Pyle.

He'd come to North Carolina from Pennsylvania around 1766 with his wife and their eight children.

Almost immediately, he got himself in trouble.

We know this because in 1766, John Pyle wrote an apology letter to Colonel Edmund Fanning.

- "Colonel Fanning, whereas I have been active in publishing and spreading a certain piece of writing of a scandalous and defaming nature against thee, for the doing of which I am really sorry.

Therefore, I have wrote to thee earnestly, begging thy forgiveness, intending if God doth enable me to behave better in the future, giving under my hand, the 17th of March, 1766, John Pyle, in present of John Carter."

- [Producer] What strikes you about that?

- He's sorry.

He talked about him, didn't he?

- [Narrator] But Pyle wasn't sorry for long.

Two years later in 1768, he signed a Regulator petition, and was accused of taking part in a confrontation in Hillsborough, where about 80 Regulators seized the sheriff, paraded him backwards through town on a confiscated horse, and fired shots into Edmund Fanning's house.

Two years after that, another Hillsborough riot erupted.

Regulators stormed a session of the Superior Court, dragged officials from the courthouse, and publicly beat them.

One of the men beaten that day was a clerk working for the Colonial government named John Luttrell.

So here they are, a decade before revolution.

John Pyle, the doctor on the side of the Regulators, who wanted fair treatment from Crown officials, and John Luttrell, one of those officials on the receiving end of Regulator rage.

The following year, the Regulators and the colonial militia met at the Battle of Alamance.

The Regulators were crushed.

As a reminder, the Regulators weren't against the Crown, they just wanted change, which helps explain what came next.

When the American Revolution broke out, the new Royal Governor had actually begun addressing Regulator grievances, and Pyle, like most Regulators, stayed loyal to the Crown.

But Luttrell, the man who'd been beaten for serving the Crown, took a different path.

In 1776, he took a commission in the Continental Army.

And a few years later, on his own property, he'd built a fortified barracks that became the nerve center of Patriot operations across the Piedmont.

But very few people have ever heard of it.

We may never have connected Luttrell and Pyle if it weren't for a man named Thomas Mattocks and his 20-year-long research obsession.

One day, while looking into his own family history, Thomas came across a pension record filed by his relative, Joseph Hackney.

Joseph served under John Luttrell in the Chatham County militia during the American Revolution.

And something in this record caught Thomas's eye, a place called Luttrell's Barracks.

Thomas had never heard of such a thing in Chatham County, so he searched an online database of pension applications and got more than 50 hits from Revolutionary War veterans who reported on the barracks.

He decided to find out where they were.

First he found the deed for John Luttrell's land, which said it was on the lower fork of the Terrell Creek, here.

- I started looking at state maps, hoping I could find some map that may possibly show the barracks, and I actually did.

It was the 1833 Brazier-MacRae map, which was actually the first map that was ordered by the state legislature based on actual surveys.

And what's interesting about that map, it shows post offices and it says barracks, and there's a structure there, and it appeared on several other maps.

That convinced me that Luttrell's Barracks was right there at the [indistinct] crossroad.

- [Narrator] Thomas also discovered that his relative, Joseph Hackney, had a personal history with the other character in our story, John Pyle.

In his pension application, Hackney reported arresting John Pyle, who'd fought as a Loyalist in North Carolina's first Revolutionary War battle at Moores Creek.

After his arrest, Pyle took an oath of loyalty to the state and was allowed to go home.

For the next several years, Pyle stayed out of local fighting, but that was about to change.

Soon, Pyle would raid Luttrell's Barracks.

To understand why, we visit a relative of John Pyle.

[ducks chirping] We're meeting Ron Osborne on a farm not too far from where John Pyle once farmed.

- [Ron] This is called the Poultry Palace, and they're all ready to get out.

Okay, here they come.

[birds chirping] - [Narrator] Ron's a genealogist and historic reenactor, so he knows a thing or two about uniforms, which is good, because they're about to play a big part in this story.

- [Ron] Tricorne hat, shoes with a buckle.

A lot of time, you could put these on either foot, which, not very comfortable at all.

- [Narrator] Four years after Pyle swore that loyalty oath, the war came home.

After the catastrophe at Camden, the British were marching into North Carolina, and Loyalists across the Piedmont began organizing.

Pyle picked up where he'd left off.

In the early months of 1781, he raised a militia of several hundred men from the area.

He raided Luttrell's Barracks and sent word to Cornwallis, asking for military escort to Hillsborough.

But things were about to go terribly wrong for John Pyle.

Pyle was marching this militia towards a rendezvous point, where he was supposed to meet Cornwallis's officers, whose uniforms looked like this.

- Everything was going just as planned until the American cavalry got intelligence about this rendezvous.

- [Narrator] A highly skilled Patriot cavalry, led by Henry Light Horse Lee, was about to use that intelligence.

- Lee's legion decide to encounter John Pyle and the militia.

Now, what helped the matter from Lee's standpoint is both British calvary and the American calvary had uniforms that had green in them.

If you'd never seen one before and you heard that they were coming to rendezvous with you, you might mistake one for the other.

Lee took advantage of that.

John Pyle had his men lined up, heard that, "Oh, the British cavalry's approaching," you know, "To greet us, and they're gonna escort us into Cornwallis's camp near Hillsborough."

Lee's legion got among all of Loyalists on either side of the road.

They drew their sabers and proceeded to hack them.

- [Narrator] One of the names given to this battle is Pyle's Hacking Match, Because it was pretty much a one-sided affair.

The Patriots decimated Pyle's Loyalists, which stifled local support of the British.

Pyle himself barely survived, and according to local tradition, he crawled into a nearby pond and hid until his friends found him badly wounded.

A green jacket could belong to either side.

More than 90 men could die in 10 minutes over the confusion.

That was the nature of this war.

After this massacre, Pyle was broken, but the war wasn't done with him or with John Luttrell.

Their paths were about to cross one final time.

In March, just weeks after Pyle's defeat, the British and Continental armies clash at the Battle of Guilford Court House.

It was technically a British victory, but it cost Cornwallis so many men that he pulled out of the interior.

The big armies left, but in the Backcountry, the fighting didn't stop.

In the fall of 1781, the Loyalists pulled off a surprise attack on Hillsborough that no one saw coming.

They captured the Patriot governor of North Carolina, and they left town with hundreds of political and military prisoners and headed towards Wilmington, the closest British military installation.

Word spread across the Backcountry.

Patriot militia mustered from every direction, and Colonel Luttrell and his men rode north from the barracks, heading to intercept the Loyalists and free the Governor.

Pyle was back home, not far from where all of this was about to come to a head.

The day after the Governor was captured, the Patriots set up an ambush near Lindley's Mill, where the road from Hillsborough crossed the King Creek.

Luttrell and his mounted militia were a part of the ambush.

The fighting lasted four hours, but Loyalists fought their way through and escaped with the governor still in their custody.

The Patriots lost, and John Luttrell lay dead.

Five weeks later, the British surrendered at Yorktown, but the former Crown clerk who'd given his life and his land to the Patriot cause didn't live to see it.

When the guns died down, some of the Quakers who were members of this meeting house came out of the woods.

Tradition says they cared for the wounded on both sides and buried the dead.

John Pyle also emerged from his home and onto the battlefield, not as a military commander, but as a doctor and a neighbor, tending the wounded on both sides.

Later, a Patriot commander gave Pyle a letter of recommendation, acknowledging his service that day.

His property was saved from confiscation, and he was acquitted of all charges in the Chatham County Court.

And John Pyle lived out the rest of his days as an American citizen.

- When we study the American Revolution, you know, we think good guys versus bad British, but we don't tend to think about the people.

These were neighbors.

- I just don't think that they get enough credit.

People like John Luttrell rarely mentioned in history books, but I mean, he gave his life for this country.

- It's the same thing back then.

It's the same thing today.

We are all in this together, and yes, we can say, "Well, it's far off," and then the next thing you know, you wake up and there's a battle out your front door.

- [Narrator] We don't know for certain where either man is buried, and most folks we talk to have never heard of them.

In that way, they're alike, and both represent something essential about the Revolution, as it was actually fought in the North Carolina Backcountry, not by generals or statesmen, but a doctor and a clerk living down the road from each other, pulled into a war that turned their own community inside out, pitting neighbor against neighbor.

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