a wordDown East

In North Carolina, the coastal plain east of Raleigh — the barbecue east, where the hog is cooked whole and the sauce has no tomato; eastern North Carolina barbecue is also called Down East barbecue. The narrow sense is the string of fishing communities east of Beaufort in Carteret County — Bettie, Otway, Straits, Harkers Island, Gloucester, Marshallberg, out to Cedar Island — and Wikipedia says the phrase has broadened to mean eastern North Carolina generally, the central coastal plain of Greenville, Goldsboro, Kinston, New Bern, Rocky Mount, Tarboro, Washington and Wilson.

The phrase is New England's first: a ship from Boston bound for Maine ran before the south-west wind, so Maine was down east, and the term is on record from 1817. North Carolina has its own. To Carteret County, Down East is the villages east of Beaufort, where the accent is the coastal 'High Tider' brogue; to Raleigh and the Piedmont the same words cover the whole coastal plain, and the towns Wikipedia lists for that broader sense are the barbecue towns — Rocky Mount, where Bob Melton opened the state's first sit-down barbecue restaurant in 1924; Wilson, where Ed Mitchell grew up; Greenville, with Ayden and the Skylight Inn just south. In the 1980s newspaper war over what barbecue meant, Dennis Rogers of the Raleigh News & Observer spoke for the east and Jerry Bledsoe of Greensboro for Lexington. Tradition holds — in barbecue talk Down East means whole hog and vinegar, and where it begins is argued; the fall line east of Raleigh is the usual answer. Inference — down is the way the rivers run — Neuse, Tar, Roanoke — and east is where they go; the Carolina phrase needs no ship.