Before the charter, the settlement went by other names. Bell's Corner was one. Shepardsville was another, after a local landowner named Shepard who held the land in the early 18th century. The Newport River, navigable in those years all the way to Old Topsail Inlet, made the place useful. Beaufort Inlet, as it would later be called, opened to the Atlantic Ocean and brought in trade. Early industries were the kind a coastal Carolina town could support: agriculture, logging, and naval stores. Turpentine production was a major piece of the economy, distilled from the pines that grew thick across the inland flats. The Newport River Primitive Baptist Church, organized in 1778, became one of the earliest organized churches in Carteret County.

When the Civil War came, Newport sat at a strategic point on the rail line that ran from Goldsboro through Newport to Beaufort, completed in 1858 as the final 96-mile stretch of the Atlantic and North Carolina Railroad. The Newport Barracks operated here as a Union camp. After General Ambrose Burnside captured New Bern in March 1862, Brigadier General John G. Parke pushed south to reduce Fort Macon, and Newport fell on March 23. The retreating Confederates burned the railroad bridge over the Newport River. Parke had to repair it before he could move his siege artillery to Bogue Banks. Newport remained under Union occupation for most of the war, the Primitive Baptist Church was burned near war's end, and then quickly rebuilt on the corner of Haskett Street and New Bern Street where it stands today.

In the 20th century, Newport's economy turned eastward, toward the military bases that grew up after World War II. Part of the town's residential area, still called the housing project by locals, was originally built for civil-service employees and military personnel working at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point seven miles to the north. The base's growth shaped Newport's growth: 3,349 residents in 2000, 4,364 in 2020. The town has remained a service center for the bases and for the agricultural land that surrounds it. US-70 cuts through west of the town center, a four-lane highway connecting Morehead City ten miles southeast and Havelock seven miles north. New Bern is twenty-five miles further north up the same road.

Newport Consolidated School opened in 1926 and ran first through twelfth grade until 1966, when the county built a new consolidated high school, West Carteret High, in nearby Morehead City. The old school was demolished. But the alumni did not let it go. Members of the Newport Consolidated School Alumni Association operate a small museum dedicated to it in a depot warehouse owned by the North Carolina Railroad in Newport, a quiet space crowded with photographs of football teams and graduating classes from a forty-year run. The town's current schools, the Carteret Pre-K Center, Newport Elementary, and Newport Middle, send their older students on to West Carteret. A fire department founded in the 1940s by Leon Mann Jr. still protects the town with paid and volunteer crews.