English farmers and French Huguenot refugees began settling along the Pamlico River in the 1690s, drawn by the wide tidal waters and dense forests ripe for the naval stores trade. Among them was John Lawson, a naturalist and explorer who would become Bath's founding father. He laid out the town into 71 waterfront lots, each about a tenth of an acre, and on March 8, 1705, the General Assembly chartered it as North Carolina's first incorporated town. Lawson documented the beauty of the place in his writings, but beauty did not guarantee peace. By 1708, Bath held just 12 houses and 50 people. Yellow fever struck in 1711, followed by drought, and then the Tuscarora War erupted as the powerful Tuscarora people fought to push back the settlers encroaching on their territory. They attacked Bath and the surrounding plantations along the rivers. The conflict raged until 1715, when a coalition of colonial forces and allied indigenous nations defeated them.

By 1718, Bath had attracted a different kind of resident. Edward Teach, the pirate known as Blackbeard, arrived fresh from terrorizing shipping lanes along the East Coast and in the West Indies. He accepted a royal pardon offered through the colonial governor, married a local woman, and settled at Plum Point across Bath Creek. The reformed pirate befriended Governor Charles Eden, and for a brief season Bath harbored the most feared man on the Atlantic. But retirement did not suit Blackbeard. He returned to piracy within months, and Virginia forces captured and killed him later that year. Today a historical marker along Main Street commemorates his time in town, a reminder that Bath's waterfront once sheltered both merchants and marauders.

Bath holds the curious distinction of having served as North Carolina's first capital without ever hosting permanent government institutions. When the Province of North Carolina was separated from the Province of Carolina in 1712 and granted its own governor, Bath received the nominal designation. The General Assembly met there periodically through the 18th century, but the capital officially moved to Edenton in 1722 and the colony's permanent government did not take root until New Bern was established as the new capital in 1743. Bath also witnessed Cary's Rebellion in 1711, an armed struggle over religion and politics that roiled the young colony. Through it all, the town remained small, its importance as a port and political center steadily eclipsed by larger neighbors.

In the spring of 1925, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edna Ferber visited Bath Creek to research river theater. She boarded the James Adams Floating Theatre, a showboat that traveled the inland waterways of the mid-Atlantic, and spent several days absorbing the world of traveling performers. The experience became the foundation for her 1926 novel Show Boat, a sweeping story of three generations aboard a floating theater. The novel tackled interracial relationships and racial segregation in the South with a frankness that shocked readers. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II adapted it into a groundbreaking Broadway musical that premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre in December 1927. Bath itself, the sleepy town where Ferber found her inspiration, would have been easy to miss from the road -- exactly as Whitefield predicted.

Bath today lies almost entirely within the same boundaries John Lawson drew more than three centuries ago. St. Thomas Church, built in 1734, stands as the oldest surviving church in North Carolina. The Palmer-Marsh House, constructed in 1751 by merchant and legislator Captain Michael Coutanche, remains one of the oldest frame houses in the state and is a National Historic Landmark. The Bonner House and the Bath Historic District are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. While the major cities of North Carolina grew in the Piedmont, fueled by railroads and textile mills, Bath stayed put on its tidal creek. Beaufort County's population has swelled to nearly 50,000, but the town itself has never exceeded 400 residents. Development has come in the form of retirement and vacation homes along the coast, bringing a service economy but little of the growth that transformed the rest of the state. Bath endures as a village, just as the evangelist declared it would.