Bertie was formed in 1722, named for the Bertie family of English nobles, two of whom (James and Henry Bertie) were Lords Proprietor of Carolina. The original county was enormous; subsequent divisions carved out Northampton, Edgecombe, and parts of other counties from its territory, leaving the modern Bertie as a triangular wedge bounded by the Roanoke, the Chowan, and the Albemarle Sound. The county seat is Windsor, on the Cashie River - itself a quiet blackwater tributary of the Albemarle. The other towns are tiny: Askewville, Aulander, Colerain, Kelford, Lewiston Woodville, Powellsville, Roxobel. The land between them is mostly fields and pine plantations, with cypress swamp dominating the river bottomlands. Hope Plantation, just outside Windsor, preserves the home of David Stone, a U.S. senator and North Carolina governor from the early nineteenth century, and is open as a state historic site.

One of the county townships is called Indian Woods, and the name preserves a difficult history. After the Tuscarora War of 1711-1715, the surviving Tuscarora in eastern North Carolina were confined to a reservation in what is now Bertie County. The reservation - a strip of land along the Roanoke River - was steadily reduced through the eighteenth century as colonial officials pressured the Tuscarora to lease or sell their lands. Most Tuscarora eventually moved north to join their Iroquoian relatives in New York and Canada. A small number remained in Bertie and the surrounding counties. The state-recognized Meherrin Indian Tribe, whose people are an Iroquoian group historically related to the Tuscarora, has members in Bertie and the neighboring counties today. The Indian Woods township carries the memory of a much older landscape.

Bertie has been losing people for a long time. The 2024 estimate places the population at 16,939, down about 5.5 percent from 2020. Look further back and the trend is steeper - the county had 21,282 people in 2010 and over 19,000 in 2000. The reasons are familiar across the rural American South: young people leave for jobs in larger cities, the agricultural economy demands fewer workers, the local industrial base has thinned. Median household income across 2019-2023 was $45,931, well below the North Carolina median. About a fifth of residents live below the federal poverty line. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction rated the Bertie County school system 'low-performing' for the 2021-2022 academic year, a label that reflects the gap between rural and metropolitan school funding as much as any other single factor.

What Bertie has, in compensation, is space. Open land, big skies, cypress-lined rivers running mostly empty. The county is the kind of place where photographers go for the unspoiled river views and where birders go for the migratory waterfowl that use the Roanoke and Cashie bottomlands. The historic crossroads of Merry Hill, on a peninsula reaching into the Albemarle Sound, offers some of the most expansive water views in northeastern North Carolina. The fishing in the Chowan and Roanoke is excellent. The roads stay quiet. The 2024 presidential election marked the strongest Republican performance in Bertie County since 1984, with Donald Trump winning nearly 42 percent of the vote - a political shift mirroring the broader rural realignment of the eastern Carolinas. The county still has a majority-Black population, sixty-two percent in 2010 figures, and remains part of the Black Belt's deep historical and political geography.