75% of the port's activities. In 1748, Brunswick Town was attacked by Spanish privateers and held for three days until Colonel William Dry and Brunswick citizens drove them away.
Royal governor Arthur Dobbs arrived in Brunswick in 1754 and constructed the governor's mansion, Russellborough. Dobbs' presence, along with the construction of a royal chapel, St. Philip's Church, kept the town alive while nearby Wilmington continued to grow economically and politically. After Dobbs' death in 1765, William Tryon was appointed governor of North Carolina and continued using Russellborough as the governor's official residence. In 1765, the citizens of Brunswick surrounded the governor's home in protest to the Stamp Act of 1765 and placed Tryon under house arrest. The protest, one of the first incidents of armed colonial resistance to British rule, was the result of Maurice Moore's pamphlet The Justice and Policy of Taxing the American Colonies, a criticism of British taxation. The protest resulted in the end of stamp tax collection for the Cape Fear region.
With the combination of Wilmington's continued growth and Tryon moving to his new residence, Tryon Palace in New Bern, Brunswick Town continued to decline. By 1775, the few families that still lived in Brunswick Town fled due to fears of a British attack during the American Revolutionary War. In the spring of 1776, British soldiers from the
