In 1736, Duplin County (then upper New Hanover County) was the destination of several hundred Ulster Scots (Scotch-Irish) and a handful of Swiss Protestants. They settled on a plot of land, between the Northeast Cape Fear River and Black River, obtained from the Crown by Henry McCulloh of London. Their first settlements were Soracta (Sarecta) on the Northeast Cape Fear, an area at the lower end of Goshen Swamp (then called Woodward's Chase), and the grove where the Duplin County Courthouse now stands. According to census records, several families of Sarecta and the settlement at the south end of Goshen Swamp had gravitated to the crossroads of what would become Beulaville by the middle of the nineteenth century.