Renaissance faires in North Carolina

North Carolina's flagship renaissance event, the Carolina Renaissance Festival in Huntersville, was founded in 1994 by Jeff Siegel of Royal Faires, Ltd., the company that also owns and operates the Arizona Renaissance Festival, and it ranks among the largest renaissance fairs in America by acreage, with a permanent 25-acre village called Fairhaven set within roughly 300 acres. It runs Saturdays and Sundays in October and November and draws about 230,000 visitors a year to more than 140 arts-and-crafts shops, 16 stages, and over 1,000 costumed villagers. The state's costumed-festival tradition reaches back further on the Celtic side: the Grandfather Mountain Highland Games near Linville were founded in 1956 by Agnes MacRae Morton and Donald MacDonald, moved to the second weekend of July two years after their debut, and are described by the state's Department of Natural and Cultural Resources as the largest 'clan gathering' in the world — a legacy of North Carolina's history as a major Highland Scots settlement into the 1800s. What most distinguishes the state's scene is pirate reenactment staged where the history actually happened. Beaufort's Pirate Invasion, created in 1960, restages the town's 1747 battle to drive off Spanish privateers. On the Outer Banks, Ocracoke — Blackbeard's operational headquarters in 1717–1718 and the site of his death in a 1718 battle with Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard — transforms into an 18th-century pirate port each October for Blackbeard's Pirate Jamboree.

Sources: Wikipedia — Carolina Renaissance Festival · Carolina Renaissance Festival (official site) · NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources — Highland Games at Grandfather Mountain · Crystal Coast NC — Beaufort Pirate Invasion · Visit Ocracoke — Blackbeard's Ocracoke