Before it had a name and a Revolutionary cause, the settlement was just a riverbank with good water access. James Bonner, an English-born planter and Patriot, owned land where the Tar River broadens and becomes the tidal Pamlico, and through the 1770s small wharves and warehouses began to appear on his property. He called it Forks of the Tar. When the Continental Congress was deliberating in Philadelphia, Bonner deeded his hundred acres to the town and the residents renamed it. During the Revolution itself, with the major North Carolina ports of Wilmington and Edenton under threat or blockade, Washington served as a backup supply point for goods bound inland. The river was the road.

The Civil War was hard on Little Washington. The town changed hands repeatedly. In 1862 a Union gunboat bombarded the courthouse - the original 1824 building burned to the ground from a shell hit - and the Union held the town for most of the war. A cannonball from that period is still on display in a Water Street attorney's office today, embedded in a small glass case. Civil War re-enactors gather outside town each year. The waterfront was a target because the Pamlico River was a logistical asset; whoever held the river held the supply line into the interior. The damage from both wartime bombardment and a series of nineteenth-century fires explains why most of Washington's downtown architecture, though carefully restored, dates from the post-Reconstruction era rather than the colonial period.

In 1990 the Washington Daily News, with a circulation under ten thousand, won the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service - the smallest daily newspaper in history to win the award. The reporting series investigated local water contamination, and the paper's persistence in the face of municipal denial brought national attention. The Pulitzer is, in some ways, characteristic of Little Washington's self-image: a small place that occasionally punches well above its weight. The town has produced a startling number of nationally known figures - NBA player Dominique Wilkins, MLB player Ryan Zimmerman, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, the playwright Henry Churchill de Mille (father of director Cecil B. DeMille and grandfather of choreographer Agnes de Mille). NBA player Bam Adebayo grew up in nearby Pinetown in Beaufort County and attended Northside High School before going on to the Miami Heat. Pioneer physician Susan Dimock, one of the first American women to earn a medical degree, was born here in 1847.

Modern Washington has built much of its identity around the river that defines it. The North Carolina Estuarium, a museum on the waterfront, houses more than two hundred exhibits on the ecology of the state's estuaries and the Tar-Pamlico-Pamlico Sound system. A three-quarter-mile boardwalk runs along the river. The restored Turnage Theatre, a former vaudeville and movie house, reopened in 2014 and hosts live theater downtown. A Farmer's and Artisan's Market draws weekend crowds to the green stretches along the water. Between 1993 and 2017 the town ran a summer music festival called Music in the Streets every third Friday, drawing shoppers and tourists down to the historic district. The population was 9,875 at the 2020 census - small enough to walk across in twenty minutes, large enough to support a town with its own particular history, its own particular Pulitzer, and its own particular insistence on getting credit for being the original Washington.