Built on land that once belonged to Daniel Boone, it was the childhood and early adult home of Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909) whose The Impending Crisis of the South (published 1857) was an influential antislavery work that inflamed tensions in 1860.

[2][3] The Hinton Rowan Helper House is located west of Mocksville, set back from the north side of United States Route 64, a short way east of Bear Creek, on a 1.5-acre (0.61 ha) parcel of land that was once part of the Boone Tract, granted to Squire Boone and later owned by Daniel Boone.

[3] It was here that author Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909) spent the first twenty years of his life, living in an area where he experienced directly the impact of slavery, not just on the slaves, but also on the white lower classes.

In 1857 he published The Impending Crisis of the South, a reasoned polemic arguing that slavery was economically bad for most Southern whites, because it concentrated power and money in the slaveowning plantation elites and suppressed wages and drives to industrialize the region.

The work was met with fury in the South, where it was banned, and was used by the Republican Party as campaign material in the 1860 United States election.