Thyatira Presbyterian Church Cemetery, eight miles west of Salisbury, was established by December 10, 1750, and is the oldest ecclesiastical cemetery in the western half of North Carolina. Its oldest surviving grave marker is that of John Nesbit, 1755. Veterans of the French and Indian War and all other wars to the present rest here. Noteworthy graves include Elizabeth Maxwell Gillespie Steele (1722-1790), a Salisbury tavern owner who sheltered Gen. Nathanael Greene, Revolutionary War commander, on the night of February 1-2, 1781; Dr. Samuel McCorkle (1746-1811), a founder of the University of North Carolina, the first state supported school to open in the nation (1795); and four traditional “pirate graves.”