The term is more associated with the British, as far as the Rev. is concerned. But, I do have my 4G's Revolutionary War pension application, and he was referred to as a dragoon. I'd attribute the linguistic peculiarity down to the fact that large swathes of NC were isolated and virtually a frontier, right up to the Civila War, leading to the survival of quite a bit of archaic terminology and language usage. We had a Court Of Oyer And Terminer, an Anglo-French term going straight back to the Middle Ages, and there are still a few elderly people who speak close to Elizabethan English in isolated pockets on the Outer Banks and way back in the hollers of the Blue Ridge ... that sort of thing.