Bath, North Carolina’s first town

Where is Bath and how old is it?

Bath sits on Bath Creek, just off the wide Pamlico River in eastern North Carolina. Pamlico Indians lived in the area in the late 1600s. European settlers began farming along the river in the 1690s; the first were French Protestants, called Huguenots, who came from Virginia, and English families settled there too.

The district became Bath County in 1696, named after John Granville, Earl of Bath, one of the Lords Proprietors, the group of English noblemen who owned the Carolina colony. On 8 March 1705 the colony’s Assembly chartered Bath Town, making it North Carolina’s first town. John Lawson, the colony’s surveyor, helped lay out its lots. In 1709 he published A New Voyage to Carolina, often called the first history of the colony.

What was Bath like around 1715?

Small. In 1708 it had just 12 houses and about 50 people. Still, it had some firsts. A library of books sent from England in 1701 for the local church parish is counted as North Carolina’s first public library. By 1707 the town had a grist mill for grinding corn and the colony’s first shipyard, where a small sloop was built.

The colony’s leaders lived nearby. Governor Charles Eden, who took office in 1714, made his home at Bath for a time, and so did Tobias Knight, the colony’s secretary and later its chief justice. Bath is sometimes called the colony’s capital, but North Carolina had no permanent seat of government then; its officials met in different places.

Enslaved people of African descent worked on the farms around Bath and were an important part of the local economy.

What did Bath trade?

North Carolina’s coast is screened by the Outer Banks, so ships reached Bath through Ocracoke Inlet and across Pamlico Sound. In 1715 the colony asked the Proprietors for an official port, and on 1 August 1716 Port Bath was approved as North Carolina’s first port of entry, where ships had to report and pay customs duties.

Later records, from the 1760s onward, show the trade carried mostly in small sloops and schooners. Out went:

• tobacco and corn
• lumber, shingles and barrel staves
• naval stores, meaning tar and turpentine from pine trees, which ships needed to keep their hulls and ropes from rotting
• animal skins and pork

Most went to New England and the West Indies. In came rum, sugar and molasses from the Caribbean, salt from the Turks and Caicos Islands, linen from Ireland, and wine from Madeira and Bordeaux.

What happened to Bath in the Tuscarora War?

The Tuscarora nation lived on the land between the Neuse and Roanoke rivers, and as settlers pushed onto that land the anger grew. In 1711 Bath also suffered a yellow fever epidemic, a drought and a political revolt among the colonists, called Cary’s Rebellion.

In September 1711 the Tuscarora captured and killed John Lawson. On 22 September they attacked the farms around Bath, killing at least 120 colonists, and survivors crowded into the town for safety. Colonial forces from North and South Carolina, with Native allies, fought back. In March 1713 they destroyed the Tuscarora fort of Nooherooka. Around 1,000 Tuscarora were sold into slavery, and thousands more were driven from their homes; many moved north to Pennsylvania and New York.

Why did Blackbeard go to Bath?

In 1717 the King offered a pardon to pirates who surrendered, and Blackbeard decided to take it. Around 10 June 1718 Blackbeard’s flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, ran aground at Topsail Inlet. He left in a sloop, the Adventure, with a small picked crew, and stranded others on a sandbank. Stede Bonnet had already gone to Bath and received a pardon from Governor Eden. Toward the end of June Blackbeard did the same, and at least twenty of his men were pardoned with him.

For the next few weeks he lived around Plum Point, across Bath Creek near the governor’s home, and moved between Bath and his sloop at Ocracoke. It did not last. In August 1718 he captured two French ships at sea, and in September he robbed a local trader’s boat on the Pamlico River.

Were Governor Eden and Tobias Knight Blackbeard’s partners?

Many people at the time thought so. Blackbeard brought one of the French ships back and claimed he had found it empty and adrift. A court presided over by Tobias Knight declared it a wreck, so its cargo could be legally kept. According to the historian Robert E. Lee, sixty hogsheads (large barrels) of its sugar went to Eden and twenty to Knight, and the rest of the cargo to Blackbeard and his crew.

After Blackbeard was killed at Ocracoke on 22 November 1718, Royal Navy Captain Ellis Brand reported finding twenty barrels of sugar and two bags of cotton at Knight’s house, and a letter from Knight was found on the pirate’s sloop. In Virginia in 1719, four men of Blackbeard’s crew, named in the records as James Blake, Richard Stiles, James White and Thomas Gates, gave evidence against Knight. Knight answered that they were enslaved Black men, and that under the colony’s laws an enslaved person’s word could not be used against a white man. North Carolina’s council cleared him in May 1719; its record says the four men had already been executed. Knight died that June. Historians still argue about Eden and Knight, and no convincing proof has been found either way.

What happened to Bath later?

North Carolina became a royal colony, run by the Crown, on 25 July 1729. Bath stayed small. St Thomas Church, begun in 1734, is the oldest church building still standing in North Carolina, and the Assembly met in the town in 1743, 1744 and 1752. When the county government moved to the new town of Washington in 1785, Bath lost most of its trade. It stayed a small town, and today much of its colonial layout survives.