Edenton's origins reach back to 1658, when adventurers drifting south from Virginia's Jamestown settlement found a natural harbor on the northern shore of what is now Edenton Bay. They established what became the first permanent European settlement in North Carolina. The community passed through a series of names -- "the Towne on Queen Anne's Creek," then "Ye Towne on Mattercommack Creek," then "the Port of Roanoke" -- before being incorporated as Edenton in 1722, honoring Governor Charles Eden, who died that year. From 1722 to 1743, Edenton served as the colonial capital of the Province of North Carolina, a distinction that brought a governor's residence but, as visitor William Byrd II observed in 1729, not much else. Byrd described a rough frontier settlement of forty or fifty houses, most "built without Expense," where aspiring to a brick chimney was considered extravagant and the courthouse resembled a tobacco house. It was, he marveled, the only metropolis in the Christian world without a single place of public worship.

On October 25, 1774, fifty-one women gathered in Edenton and did something no women in the British American colonies had ever done before: they took organized political action. Led by Penelope Barker, the women signed a petition pledging to boycott English tea and other British goods, an act of solidarity with the Boston Tea Party that became known as the Edenton Tea Party. The protest so scandalized London that English newspapers published satirical etchings portraying the women as unruly and uncontrollable. But the women of Edenton were undeterred. Barker's home, the Barker House, still stands on the waterfront and remains open to visitors seven days a week, free of charge -- considered by many locals to be Edenton's living room. The town also produced Joseph Hewes, a successful merchant marine fleet owner who signed the Declaration of Independence and whom John Adams credited with laying "the foundation, the cornerstone of the American Navy" when Hewes became the first Secretary of the Navy in 1776.

Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in Edenton in 1813. Her early life centered around Horniblow's Tavern on East King Street, and she was baptized at St. Paul's Church. At a young age, she and her brother John became the property of Dr. James Norcom, who subjected them to years of abuse at his house on West Eden Street. In 1835, Harriet made a desperate choice. She went into hiding in the home of her grandmother, a freedwoman, on West King Street. The hiding space was a garret crawl space so cramped she could not stand upright. For seven years she endured that confinement before finally escaping to New York. There she wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pen name Linda Brent. The book is now considered an American classic, one of the most important slave narratives ever written. Her brother John also became an abolitionist speaker and author. The streets of Edenton where they lived, suffered, and resisted can still be walked today.

When the Civil War reached Edenton in 1862, the town contributed to the Confederate cause in a peculiarly poignant way. Local attorney William Badham Jr. recruited the Albemarle Artillery, but the company lacked cannons. The solution: melt down the bronze bells from the courthouse and churches of the Edenton area. The four howitzers cast from those bells were christened the Columbia, St. Paul, Fannie Roulac, and Edenton, and the unit became known as the Edenton Bell Battery. Two of those guns -- the St. Paul and the Edenton -- eventually made their way home and now stand in the town's waterfront park, silent sentinels forged from instruments of worship. Meanwhile, the town's fortunes had already begun to decline. A hurricane in 1795 silted up Roanoke Inlet, choking off sea access. The completion of the Dismal Swamp Canal in 1805 diverted shipping to Norfolk. When locals then rejected a railroad, Edenton's economic isolation was sealed for decades.

Modern Edenton is a town of about 4,400 people that wears its history on every block. The Chowan County Courthouse, built in 1776 and designated a National Historic Landmark, still hosts official court proceedings. The Cupola House, also a National Historic Landmark, stands as one of the finest examples of Jacobean architecture in the South. The oldest surviving house in North Carolina, dating to 1719, sits here as well. Down at the waterfront, the 1886 Roanoke River Lighthouse -- believed to be the last remaining rectangular screw-pile lighthouse in the United States -- was rescued and relocated to Edenton, its pilings once literally screwed into the river bottom to withstand storms. The lighthouse served from 1887 to 1941. Today, tourism drives the local economy, drawing visitors to walk the same streets where a future Supreme Court justice, James Iredell, was appointed by George Washington at age 38, and where Josephine Leary, born into slavery in 1856, became a real estate entrepreneur. Edenton may be small, but its story runs deep.