A Short History of Edenton & Chowan County

Edenton sits where the Albemarle Sound narrows into a protected harbor, on the north shore of what colonial records first called Queen Anne's Creek. That harbor, and the fertile land around it, is why English colonists organized this ground into a governed precinct before most of North Carolina had any government at all.

1668 Shaftesbury Precinct

Chowan County is among the oldest political entities in North Carolina, established in 1668 as Shaftesbury Precinct of Albemarle County — one of the earliest precincts organized as the Lords Proprietors began governing the Albemarle region¹. Around 1681 it took its current name from the Chowan River, itself named for the Chowanoac people who inhabited the watershed before European contact. Chowan County's own historical marketing still calls itself the "cradle of the colony," and the claim has a real basis: this stretch of the Albemarle predates nearly every other organized settlement in North Carolina.

The town itself came later than the county. English settlement at the specific site of Edenton is documented from 1712, when colonial records name it "the Towne on Queen Anne's Creek."² Earlier accounts also record it briefly as "Ye Towne on Mattercommack Creek" before that name settled — a reminder that a permanent name was the last thing this town acquired, not the first.

1712–1722 Four Names to Edenton

The settlement carried at least two working names — Queen Anne's Creek and Mattercommack Creek — before the North Carolina General Assembly formally incorporated it in 1722. That incorporation is also when it became "Edenton," honoring Charles Eden, the royal governor who had died that same year³. Unlike some colonial towns named for a living patron seeking favor, Edenton's name is a memorial, chosen after the fact.

A permanent name was the last thing this town acquired, not the first.

1722–1743 Colonial Capital

From 1722 to 1743, Edenton served as the second capital of the Province of North Carolina, with the colonial governor maintaining his residence in the town and the population growing accordingly. The visiting Virginia planter and diarist William Byrd II passed through in 1729 and left one of the few firsthand descriptions of the town at the time: a modest settlement of "40 or 50 Houses, most of them Small," with no church building yet standing⁴ — a useful corrective to any assumption that a colonial capital meant a grand city. It was a working port first, government seat second.

1774–1790 The Tea Party & the Founders

On October 25, 1774, fifty-one women in Edenton, led by Penelope Barker, signed a petition pledging to boycott English tea and other British goods⁵. Decades later this became known as the Edenton Tea Party — historians identify it as the first known political action by women in the British American colonies, more than a year before the Declaration of Independence and predating the more famous Boston event's political-organizing model by focusing specifically on organized female signatories, not a nighttime raid.

Two Edenton residents from the same generation shaped the nation at its founding. Joseph Hewes, a shipping merchant who settled in Edenton in 1754, was one of three North Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776⁶. As a member of the Continental Congress's naval affairs committee, he helped organize the Continental Navy from nothing and is credited with securing John Paul Jones's first Navy commission — real institutional groundwork, not a ceremonial title. James Iredell, also of Edenton, was appointed by George Washington to the first United States Supreme Court in 1790, at 38 the youngest of the original justices⁷.

The first known political action by women in the British American colonies — more than a year before the Declaration of Independence.

1813–1861 Harriet Jacobs

Edenton's colonial-era prosperity was built on slavery, and its most consequential literary figure is a direct record of that. Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton in 1813. To escape her enslaver's sexual harassment, she spent nearly seven years hidden in a crawl space above a storeroom, barely tall enough to sit upright, before finally escaping north. In 1861 she published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, under the pseudonym Linda Brent, changing the names of everyone involved to protect family still in Edenton⁸.

The book is now recognized as one of the most significant slave narratives ever published, and the most widely read written by a woman. The full original text is held as a primary source at the University of North Carolina's Documenting the American South archive — not a secondhand account, but Jacobs' own words about this specific town.

1795–1865 The Long Decline

Edenton's prosperity as a port did not last. A 1795 hurricane silted in Roanoke Inlet, the direct sea access that had made the harbor valuable, and the completion of the Dismal Swamp Canal in 1805 diverted shipping traffic north to Norfolk instead⁹. Local opposition to building a railroad compounded the isolation. By the mid-nineteenth century, the town that had governed a colony was a quiet backwater.

The Civil War reached Edenton directly: in 1862, local attorney William Badham Jr. recruited an artillery unit here, the Albemarle Artillery, whose guns were cast from bronze bells taken from the town's own courthouse and churches¹⁰. Two of those four cast howitzers were eventually returned to Edenton after the war. Following the Confederacy's defeat, the collapse of plantation agriculture left the whole Albemarle region economically depressed for decades.

1890s–1900s Mills & Revival

Edenton's economy recovered starting around 1890, built on lumbering, an 1898 cotton mill, and a 1909 peanut-processing plant — industry replacing the shipping trade that had drained away a century earlier. The Marine Corps established an air station at Edenton during World War II, an outlying field connected to Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point and Camp Lejeune; in just the ten months between January and October 1944 alone, it logged over 90,000 flight operations¹¹. The station's 1959 closure is not incidental trivia on this site — it is the specific year this fleet uses as the cutoff for "historic" housing stock on Edenton's own listings pages, since it marks the end of the district's documented period of significance in the National Register nomination.

Present The Town Today

Edenton today holds roughly 4,400 year-round residents on a waterfront that has never been walled off from the public the way some comparable historic towns' shorelines have. The colonial-era streetscape along Broad Street, the Chowan County Courthouse, the Cupola House, and the residential blocks around them are not museum pieces behind velvet rope — they are occupied houses, in a working town, still governed from the same courthouse square where a colonial governor once lived. The waterfront that made this a colonial capital, and the history that ran through it since, is still why buyers want to live here.