Scroll our Buncombe County arrest records today and you are reading the roster of
a place whose name has been American slang for empty talk for more than two hundred
years. The county gave the English language the word bunkum — and
its shortened cousin, bunk.
A county born of the frontier
Buncombe County was formed in 1791 in the mountains of western North Carolina,
carved out of the older Burke and Rutherford counties. It was named for
Colonel Edward Buncombe, a Revolutionary War officer who was
wounded and captured at the Battle of Germantown in 1777 and died a prisoner. At the
time it was so vast that locals called it the “State of Buncombe”; today its seat is
Asheville.
The speech that launched a word
The story that made the name famous happened not in the mountains but on the floor
of the U.S. House of Representatives. During the heated Missouri question
debates of 1820, the congressman whose district included Buncombe County,
Felix Walker, rose to deliver a long, rambling, and entirely
beside-the-point address. As colleagues grew restless and begged him to sit down,
Walker refused. He was not, he explained, speaking to the House at all — he was
“making a speech for Buncombe,” so the voters back home would read
in the paper that their man had spoken.
From “Buncombe” to “bunk”
The phrase stuck. “Talking to Buncombe” became Washington shorthand for grandstanding
that served the speaker’s image rather than the debate. The spelling drifted to
bunkum, then clipped to bunk — as in “that’s a lot
of bunk.” When people say debunk, they are, quite literally, clearing
away Buncombe County’s most famous export.
Why it still matters here
Two centuries later, Buncombe County is one of the jurisdictions whose public arrest
records appear on this site. The name that became a national byword for hollow words
now sits atop very real, very concrete records — booking dates, charges, court
appearances. It is a small reminder that behind every place name is a longer story,
and that the public record is one of the few places the plain facts, and not the
buncombe, are what gets written down.
Sources: public historical record. An arrest is not a conviction; all persons
are presumed innocent until proven guilty.