Part of an ongoing series on coastal North Carolina’s observance of America’s 250th.

Tensions began to brew between the colonists and Britain in the early 1760s after the Seven Years War, also called the French and Indian War, in North America. The British decided to impose new taxes on the colonies to recoup the funds that went to the war, but instead incited widespread protest.

Britain passed the Stamp Act March 22, 1765, and then in June 1767, the Townshend Act imposed duties on paint, paper, tea and other commodities. British troops attempted to enforce the Townshend duties in Boston October 1768, ultimately leading in March 1770 to the Boston Massacre that left five dead.

The British, to help the struggling United East India Co., passed the Tea Act in May 1773, allowing the company to import and sell tea to the colonies duty-free, undercutting the Dutch who had been smuggling tea in, and creating a monopoly.

Then, on Nov. 28, 1773, the Dartmouth sails into Boston Harbor, and three more ships were expected to arrive, all carrying chests of tea.

Over the next few weeks, colonists met to figure out a way to fight back. On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, around four dozen men impersonating Native Americans boarded the ships and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor.

Almost a year later, 51 women in Edenton took a more peaceful approach to protesting the tea tax by drafting a document explaining their boycott. The women committed to no longer drinking tea or wearing British cloth because of taxation without representation and sent the final copy to England.

“This action forms one of the earliest-known political actions written and organized by women in the American colonies,”  the Edenton Historical Commission explains. “The events of the ‘Edenton Tea Party’ today form an iconic moment in our nation’s history, when a community of women used their own voices to stand by their loved ones and risk the wrath of the Crown by protesting injustice.”

The women of Wilmington responded to British taxation with a similar protest in the spring of 1775, though little is known about the gathering to publicly burn tea.

Burgwin-Wright House and Gardens Assistant Museum Director Hunter Ingram told Coastal Review that the Wilmington Tea Party is an oft-overlooked event in the final days before the start of the American Revolution.

In the port city of Wilmington, the import of tea had ground to a halt by the spring of 1775.

The Continental Congress had forbidden tea from coming through the colonies’ ports, so it had become a scarce commodity, he said. That is why events like the Boston Tea Party and the Edenton Tea Party were so crucial to the cause of resistance.

“Tea was hard to come by and sacrificing it sent a message to those who were already hurting from the disruption of its trade,” Ingram continued.

The Wilmington Tea Party happened in the spring of 1775 and is only documented in one place: the writings of Janet Schaw, a Scottish woman who was traveling through Wilmington to visit her brother.

“She wrote a single line about her observations of the tea resistance in Wilmington, which she did not support. ‘The Ladies have burnt their tea in a solemn procession, but they had delayed however ’til the sacrifice was not very considerable, as I do not think anyone offered above a quarter of a pound,’” Ingram said. 

While the simple description doesn’t give many specifics, Schaw was clear in what the protestors did, Ingram said. “Burning the tea was unique, and it meant the women of Wilmington, even in the eleventh hour before the outbreak of war, were willing to set a precious privilege blaze in the name of revolution.”

The Burgwin-Wright House is the oldest and largest historic site in Wilmington, comprised of four of the eight remaining colonial structures in town, Ingram said of the house’s importance during the Revolution.

“We have three buildings from the city’s first jail, circa 1744, and the mansion home built in 1770 on top of the main jail building after the prisoners were relocated. It has sat at the corner of Third and Market streets for 256 years, and it has watched Wilmington grow from small-but-mighty port city into a thriving town that was, for a time, the most populous area in the state,” Ingram explained.

“The colonial era in Wilmington doesn’t always get its due, but the surviving home built for merchant and politician John Burgwin can tell that story –– and has been for generations,” said Ingram.

Ingram explained that that the Burgwin-Wright House had partnered with the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Wilmington Ladies Tea Walk Chapter to commemorate the 251st anniversary of the protest with the “Wilmington Ladies Tea Walk.”

The Wilmington Ladies Tea Walk event begins at 10 a.m. Thursday, March 26, at 224 Market St. the program will include remarks from a few historic organizations and officials and samples of a brand-new tea blend by Cape Fear Spice Merchants.

“Guests can walk through the gardens, enjoy a presentation about Janet Schaw and then join members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Sons of the American Revolution as they walk, in a solemn procession, to river to burn tea in commemoration of this act of resistance on the eve of revolution,” he said.

The historic home is a good fit for the Wilmington Ladies Tea Walk because the site likely would have been “witness to that solemn procession into history, and the act of resistance that helped give Wilmington a reputation for rebellion even before the war.”

Schaw was also a Loyalist, as was Burgwin, and it’s “likely she would have visited the house during her time in Wilmington. This was a home built for a wealthy guest list, and Janet would have qualified,” he said.

Though the program is offered at no charge, registration is required. Call 910-762-0570 to register.

“If you can’t get in this year, we hope to make it a recurring event through multiyear A250 celebration,” Ingram said, referring to the state’s official celebration of 250 years of independence, America 250 NC, a program under the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Note from the author: This is the first photo-essay in a series I’m calling “Working Lives: Photographs from Eastern North Carolina, 1937 to 1947.” You can find my introduction to the series here.

I want to begin this series by looking at a group of 21 photographs that chronicle threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton in the years just before the Second World War.

The oldest of the photographs was taken in 1937. Others were taken in 1938 and in the autumn of 1941, just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. One other was taken in 1942.

The first group of photographs focuses on the harvest workers, mostly the threshers, but also the diggers. A second group looks at the work of cleaning, grading and bagging the peanuts at a plant and warehouse in Edenton.

An ancient crop native to South America, peanuts spread across much of the world through the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the 16th and 17th centuries. Farmers in West Africa were among those who came to grow them.

Most historians and ethnobotanists believe that peanuts came to North America, especially to Virginia and North Carolina, via West Africa and the slave trade in the 18th century. By most accounts, they were long considered a crop mainly for feeding hogs and for feeding the enslaved Africans that were forced to raise crops on the region’s plantations.

According to a 2019 article in the journal Peanut Science, southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina were especially important in the crop’s early development in North America in large part because of the slave trade.

In the southeastern part of the North Carolina coast, the Wilmington area was also an important center of peanut farming in the the 18th century. Again, wholly reliant on slave labor.

By 1860, the majority of the peanuts in the U.S. were grown on North Carolina’s coastal plain, though they were rarely grown as a commercial crop.

Little is known about how enslaved people utilized peanuts as a food, though it is assumed that some of the traditional peanut dishes of the Gullah Geechee peoples date to the slavery era. A good description of peanut farming’s early history in the Wilmington vicinity can be found at the website for Poplar Grove Plantation, a historic site built around what used to be a slave labor camp in Pender County.

A number of factors contributed to making peanuts into a successful commercial crop in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Those factors included the adoption of peanuts as an easy-to-carry, nonperishable, high protein food by Civil War soldiers; the groundbreaking research that George Washington Carver did on new food uses for peanuts at Tuskegee Institute; and the collapse of cotton prices and the rise of the boll weevil in the 1920s, which led many southern farmers to search for alternative crops.

Another important factor in the growth of peanuts and peanut farming was the development of popular new peanut products.

Modern peanut butter was invented sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, though there is some disagreement over where it was first made and who first invented it.

Another important development in the growing popularity of peanuts occurred in 1906, when two Italian immigrants, Amadeo Obici and Mario Peruzzi, both innovators in the roast peanut trade, established a partnership that led to the creation of the Planters Nut and Chocolate Co., which is still famous for its “Mr. Peanut” logo and mascot today.

When Obici and Peruzzi located their first plant in Suffolk, Virginia, 50 miles north of Edenton, in 1913, they guaranteed an almost endless demand for peanuts in the northeast corner of North Carolina, and other peanut processing companies followed.

Peanut candies were also growing popular in those first decades of the 20th century. The peanut-laden Baby Ruth candy bar first appeared in 1923, the no less peanutty Mr. Goodbar in 1925, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in 1928, Snickers in 1930, and Payday in 1932.

Cracker Jacks were a bit older — they were first developed in 1898 — but the popularity of Cracker Jacks and roasted peanuts soared with the popularity of baseball in the early 20th century.

All of which is to say, the demand for peanuts skyrocketed in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Throughout that time, the center of the peanut farming and peanut processing industry continued to be southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina.

When these photographs were taken in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the peanut belt in North Carolina ran from the counties on the north side of Albemarle Sound, including Chowan County, where Edenton is, west through Bertie, Martin, Northampton, and Halifax counties.

In those years, Enfield, a small town in Halifax County, was considered the state’s busiest peanut market.

In the photographs below, you will find something of a guide to this part of life and work in Eastern North Carolina’s history.

The photographs give us a glimpse at the people who worked in the peanut fields, and a look into a peanut mill in Edenton.

They introduce us to the kind of work that thousands upon thousands of mainly African American field workers did for much of the 20th century.

But as you will see, the stories behind the photographs also introduce us to people whom I never would have expected to meet in the peanut fields of Eastern North Carolina, including even Bahamian migrant laborers and Italian POWs from North Africa.

Note: I have arranged the photo-essays in my “Working Lives” series in chronological order to the extent possible. I’m beginning with these scenes from the peanut fields in Edenton because the earliest photograph among them is dated 1937. The last in the series will feature pickle factory workers in Faison and Mt. Olive in 1947.

So let’s get started with our first photograph, taken in the midst of threshing season on a peanut farm near Edenton.

-1-

In our first photograph, a broad view of threshing time on a peanut farm near Edenton is spread out before us. We can see a field that seems to go on forever, threshers at work, several mules, piles of peanut hay, the dust rising up off a mechanical peanut picker, and a pile of burlap bags heavy with peanuts.

Threshing was hard work, but the hardest work had already been done some weeks earlier, when scores of field workers had dug the peanut vines and pods out of the ground and set them out on stakes to cure.

Like beans and peas, peanuts are a legume, technically not a nut, but they are exceptional among the legumes because their pods develop beneath the ground.

To harvest the peanuts in this field, laborers, probably all of them African American, dug up the the whole plant: vine, pods and all. It was a grueling job accomplished with mules, plows, and a great deal of sweat.

After digging the vines out of the ground, the field workers shook the dirt loose from the plants before setting them out to cure. A task that, in my experience, is harder than it sounds and which nobody remembers fondly.

In a field this size, hundreds of field laborers would likely have done the digging, shaking and staking.

Firsthand accounts of peanut field workers’ labors are rare, but on July 5, 1983, the Wilmington Star-News ran an interview with an African American woman who dug peanuts on a large farm around the time that these photographs were taken.

The interview featured Ms. Carrie Simmons Ballard, who was born at Poplar Grove in Pender County in 1905.

The reporter wrote:

“As a child, she ‘put in many hours picking peanuts on The Big Lot’ where her great-grandmother was the main house servant for the Foy family. Her grandmother and mother also worked for the family. ‘They grew some cotton too, but the main farm product was peanuts,’ she said.

“‘I never did much cotton picking, but I sure did my share in the peanut fields…..’”

Ms. Ballard went on to say, “The thing that stands out most in my mind was how hard we worked for so little. It seemed like we had to work so hard for just some food and barely something to wear.”

-2-

In this photograph, we see what is apparently the same Edenton peanut farm, but three years earlier. In the foreground, we get an especially good look at the “shocks” that were typical of peanut farming in that day.

As field workers dug the peanut vines and pods out of the ground, they would place stakes in the ground and build up stacks of vines and pods around the stakes so that the pods could cure before threshing. Those mounds of peanut vines were called “shocks.”

Farmers typically left the shocks in the field and let the peanuts cure for five or six weeks before threshing began. To this day, some old-timers brook no doubt that peanuts cured in shocks are more flavorful than those cured in windrows, the more modern way.

-3-

This is another photograph of threshing time at the farm near Edenton.

In this case, we can see workers operating a mechanical thresher, usually called a picker, in the center of the photograph. However, I was really drawn to this photograph because it highlights the peanut shocks stretched out in the field behind the threshers.

A field full of peanut shocks was a sight to see, reflecting endless hours of toil. In the largest fields, such as this one, they always remind me of the scenes in “Anna Karenina” of threshing time in the Russian countryside.

-4-

After the peanuts had cured, farm workers pulled up the stakes and raked up the hay, as it was called, being careful to stay clear of the snakes and rats that were notoriously fond of them.

Horses or mules would then cart the hay to a stationary mechanical picker that operated in the field.

The 1940s was a moment in history when tractors and mules often worked side by side in Eastern North Carolina’s fields.

Even as late as 1940, only about 4% of the state’s farmers owned tractors. Even a large, comparatively prosperous farmer, as the owner of his field must have been, was unlikely to have more than the one tractor, which, as we will see, this farmer was using to power his mechanical picker.

The end of the Age of Mules was nigh, but it had not yet arrived on the eve of the Second World War.

-5-

Here we see workers unloading hay next to the mechanical picker in our peanut field outside Edenton.

On the right, we can see a pile of stakes that have already been stripped of their vines. On the left, a man is stitching up a burlap bag of peanuts that have just come out of the picker.

-6-

By the time this photograph was taken, at least larger peanut farmers were using pickers such as this one that were powered by long belts attached to the back axel of a farm truck or, in this case, a tractor.

Even a few years earlier, horses or mules would have done the job.

-7-

This photograph provides a closer look at the farm’s mechanical peanut picker, a machine that was designed to break up the hay, remove the peanuts from the vines, and shake out debris and dust. It was a technology that had just come into widespread use in the previous two decades.

An unschooled African American farmer and inventor named Benjamin Hicks, in Southampton County, Virginia, filed what is believed to be the first patent for a mechanical peanut picker in 1901.

By all accounts, Hicks cobbled his ingenious machine together with a blacksmith’s anvil, tool box, and carpenter’s tools.

At least two makers of farm equipment modeled their peanut pickers on Hicks’ design, one of them without his consent.

To learn more about that patent dispute and about Benjamin Hicks, see Anna Zeide’s recent article in the journal Agricultural History, “The Dignity of Invention: Race, Intellectual Property, and Peanut Agriculture, 1900-1920.”

-8-

In this photograph, we see one of the many young field workers that labored in this farm’s fields during the peanut harvest.

The mechanical thresher separated out the peanuts, emptying them into galvanized tin tubs. This worker is carrying the nuts to other field hands who will bag them, stitch the bag shut, and load the bags onto a truck.

At that time, the average wage for agricultural workers on the East Coast of the U.S. was $1.20 a day.

As part of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress had enacted important child labor reforms during the Great Depression. Those laws specifically exempted children who worked on farms.

By one estimate, half a million children were working in America’s fields in 1938.

-9-

In this photograph, we see another young field worker emptying a pail of peanuts into a burlap bag, while another, older man stitches a bag shut and makes it ready for shipment.

-10-

The farm workers next loaded the bags of peanuts onto a truck that would carry them into one of the two peanut processing plants in Edenton.

Note the sea of peanut shocks in the distance. They seem to go on forever.

On the upper left, we can see the dust rising up from the mechanical picker as it separates the vines and peanuts.

-11-

Once the peanuts had been separated, laborers carted away the peanut hay usually for use as livestock feed.

Farmers valued peanut hay as an especially good feed for hogs.

-12-

I am not exactly sure what is happening in this scene, but I suspect that we are looking at a small hay baler or a presser that flattened and compacted the vines after they passed through the picker. Farmers sometimes used such machines to  make it easier to store the hay for use as livestock fodder.

-13-

A large part of the peanuts harvested on that north side of the Albemarle Sound ended up here, at the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s plant in Edenton. Located on a bay that is on the north side of Albemarle Sound, Edenton is the county seat of Chowan County, and at that time had a population of just under 4,000 citizens.

At the time these photographs were taken, Edenton was home to two peanut processing plants, the Albemarle Peanut Co. and the Edenton Peanut Co.

By 1935, according to the Greensboro News & Record on Aug. 16, 1935, the two companies were handling a total of some 25,000,000 pounds of peanuts a year.

The plant’s workers shelled, cleaned and bagged peanuts for farmers near Edenton and the rest of Chowan County, as well as peanuts harvested from farms in surrounding counties.

According to a number of accounts, you could tell when the plant was operating from some distance because a haze of smoke blanketed North Edenton when the plant was fueling its boilers with discarded peanut shells.

-14-

Here we see a great pile of peanuts waiting to be cleaned and graded at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

These workers are stacking freshly arrived, 100-pound bags of peanuts, still in the shell, in the company’s warehouse.

-15-

In this photograph, we see one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s hands lifting a bag of unshelled peanuts at the company’s warehouse.

He may be adding the bag to the stockpile or he may be taking the bag off the pile and loading it onto the handcart on the right so that he can carry it into the mill’s shelling and cleaning rooms.

-16-

This gentleman is emptying bags of peanuts so that they can be placed on conveyor belts for cleaning and grading.

Like many of the other photographs of peanut farming and peanut processing in the state-managed collection, this photograph was taken in 1941, quite likely just a few weeks or even days before Pearl Harbor.

Long before that time though, U.S. war planners had begun planning how to adjust the nation’s crop production to compensate for expected wartime disruptions in the agricultural supply chain.

They did so with an eye both toward meeting the country’s domestic food needs and toward fulfilling the country’s Lend-Lease Act agreements with Great Britain and other allied countries.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the war cut off 68% of the nation’s supply of imported vegetable oils within a year of this photograph.

That was an issue of concern to American consumers, but in some cases it was also a concern for the U.S. military.

Just to cite one example, the bulk of the palm oil used in the United States to produce nitroglycerine for military uses had come from the Philippines prior to the beginning of World War II.

However, that supply of palm oil was completely cut off when Japan occupied the the Philippines in May 1942.

Looking for substitutes for imported oils, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Monthly Review July 31, 1942, noted, “a widespread program was launched, calling for increases in production of lard, tallow, cottonseed oil, peanut oil, soy beans, and other fats and oils.”

The article goes on to say, “Farmers in the South. . .  are taking an important part in this program by expanding the production of peanuts.”

At the time this photograph was taken, military planners had just announced a federal program to expand the country’s peanut acreage by 83 percent, roughly half of which would be set aside for use as oil.

Later in the war, the government would push to raise the country’s peanuts acreage by another 50%, all of which left peanut farmers and the workers at the Albemarle Peanut Co. with little time to rest.

As part of the wartime effort to increase peanut production, the USDA even arranged to rent mechanical pickers and threshers to farmers at a low fee in order help them increase peanut acreage.

-17-

Here we see young women removing flawed or shriveled peanuts from a conveyor belt at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

-18-

This is a view of some of the chain belts that powered the conveyors at the Albemarle Peanut Co.

-19-

During the Great Depression, times were hard in Edenton, as they were throughout most of the North Carolina coast.

Somewhere between a quarter and a half of the town’s citizens were on some kind of public relief. Unemployment rose above 25%. Few could afford doctors or medicines. In many homes, mothers and fathers struggled to keep food on the table. Many cut back, trying to get by on one meal a day.

Far too many grew far too acquainted with hunger and malnutrition.

Against that background, the success of the two local peanut plants — no matter how hard the work, no matter how poorly it paid — was one of the few bright spots in Edenton’s business scene.

In the words of the Raleigh News & Observer Jan. 19, 1933,  the two plants were “a great help to the destitute condition of many Edenton families.”

Between them, the Albemarle Peanut Co. and the Edenton Peanut Co. employed some 150 to 200 workers in season and the peanut industry overall was one of the town’s largest employers.

In this photograph, one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s workers is sewing up burlap bags of peanuts to prepare them for shipment.

-20-

In this photograph, we see one of the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s workers carting bags of peanuts out to the plant’s loading dock.

Looking back now, the transformation of Eastern North Carolina’s economy that occurred in the scant few years between the earliest photograph in this group– during the Great Depression in 1937– and the last, on the eve of World War II, was almost breathtaking.

As the nation prepared for war, massive federal investments in the construction of military installations, defense industries, and shipyards especially on the North Carolina coast– and a tremendous infusion of federal dollars into supporting agriculture– proved to be a life-changing moment for countless families and for the future of the region.

During the Great Depression, incredibly high unemployment and the collapse of crop prices had been devastating for Eastern North Carolina.

That all changed during the war. By 1943, the War Department had actually declared the whole region to be a “labor shortage zone,” a designation that meant that the federal government should not target the area for other military projects out of concern that there might not be an adequate supply of civilian labor to build or support them.

Even as early as 1941, when many of these photographs were taken, a general shortage of rural labor was being felt throughout Eastern North Carolina, and the federal government’s push for increasing peanut acreage was one of many special challenges.

To address that wartime labor shortage– and regrettably, also to resist demands from African American workers to raise wages and improve working conditions– peanut farmers in northeastern North Carolina often turned to migrant farm workers and to German and Italian POWs.

In 1943, for example, the War Manpower Commission recommended that 1,500 POWs be sent to northeastern North Carolina for the peanut harvest. Five hundred Italian POWs were assigned just to the peanut harvest in Bertie, Hertford, and Martin counties.

That same year, a temporary camp for Italian POWS was erected at a baseball field in Tarboro, in Edgecombe County, just to supply labor for the local peanut harvest.

An article in the Durham Herald-Sun indicated that the Italian POWs at the Tarboro camp were mainly from Sicily and from Italy’s colonies in North Africa – so they may have included men from what are now Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and/or Somalia.

The next year, 1944, state records indicated that POWs alone harvested a total of 9,141 acres of peanuts in Eastern North Carolina. Asheville Citizen Times, Feb. 22, 1945.

For most of the war, the Farm Security Administration, or FSA, also directed migrant laborers to the region’s peanut fields.

In the fall of 1943, the FSA even opened a special government-run migrant labor camp in Enfield, in Halifax County, to house 400-500 peanut harvest workers.

Even as late as the fall of 1945, after the war was over, state and federal manpower agencies diverted hundreds of Bahamian laborers to northeastern North Carolina’s peanut fields.

That year the short-lived Naval Air Station in Edenton also temporarily housed POWs. They were only there during the peanut harvest, then returned to a POW camp in Ahoskie. Salisbury Post, Sept. 4, 1945.

-21-

These may be bags of unshelled peanuts waiting to be carried into the Albemarle Peanut Co.’s plant or they may be bags of processed peanuts waiting to be trucked out or shipped out by railroad.

In that day, a large percentage of the South’s peanut crop as a whole was bound for oil mills and peanut butter factories. Some of the peanuts that came through the Albemarle Peanut Co. no doubt had the same destination.

That said, compared to peanut varieties grown elsewhere, there was an especially high demand for the “Virginia style” peanut variety that was most commonly grown in Tidewater Virginia and in northeastern North Carolina for use as “cocktail peanuts” and for roasting.

In those last days before the war, there was really no telling where these peanuts were bound. Some of them may even have ended up on foreign battlefields, either in the packs of American soldiers or those of soldiers from Great Britain, the Soviet Union, or one of our other allies.

Acknowledgements

I want to extend a special thanks to the USDA’s James Davis III for helping me to interpret the scenes in these photographs. A third-generation peanut farmer in Palmyra, N.C., Mr. Davis was North Carolina’s “Small Farmer of the Year” in 2002 and is now a chief program officer at the USDA’s office in Raleigh.

Mr. Davis told me that some of his knowledge of peanut farming came from his farming days, some from his studies at N.C. A&T, and some from his long years as a county farm agent and director of the USDA’s office in Halifax County, N.C.

Above all, he told me, his most important teachers were his father and grandfather, the latter of whom grew up sharecropping in Edgecombe County, N.C., and ended up buying and operating his own farm in Palmyra just after the Second World War.

I am very grateful for his assistance, and I hope very much that I did justice to his lessons.

Thank you too to Professor Katherine Charron at N.C. State University and the Grant family in Tillery for introducing me to Mr. Davis.

Editor’s note: Coastal Review regularly features the work of North Carolina historian David Cecelski, who writes about the history, culture and politics of the state’s coast. More of his work can be found on his personal website.

On Oct. 25, 1774, 51 women in Edenton wrote a resolution to boycott British imports, including tea and cloth, and sent it to England.

America 250 NC commemoration and the Friends of the Archives are recognizing that move believed to be organized by Penelope Barker, wife of the treasurer of the Province of North Carolina, along with the rise of women’s participation in North Carolina politics over the last 250 years.

“From Edenton to Congress” is scheduled for 1 to 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 1, and being offered at no charge in the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Building on Jones Street in Raleigh, and online. Registration is required to participate online.

The program is to include new research on the 1774 Edenton women’s petition, a discussion of “Jane Pratt: North Carolina’s First Congresswoman,” by author Marion Deerhake, records from former Gov. Bev Perdue’s administration, and remarks by League of Women Voters President Dianna Wynn.

America 250 NC is the state’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, which is in 2026. The nonprofit Friends of the Archives privately funds some of the services, activities, and programs of the State Archives of North Carolina.

For more information or to RSVP, contact Danielle Shirilla, dani.shirilla@dncr.nc.gov or 919-814-6881.

Featured Image

The sun sets over Albemarle Sound in Edenton earlier this month near the N.C. Highway 32 bridge in this photo submitted by Tom Brennan of Edenton. “For the past couple of years I’ve been flying my drone over the Albemarle Sound capturing the dramatic cloud formations, sunsets and sunrises,” Brennan told Coastal Review. “This time of year the sound becomes impossibly calm with remarkable sunsets.”

Submit your photo.

EDENTON — Town council members this week tabled a decision on a requested special use permit related to plans to renovate a long-vacant, nearly century-old hotel in the historic district, the Outer Banks Voice reported.

SAGA Realty and Construction’s estimated $9 million plans for the four-story building include two stories of apartments, a floor of hotel suites and ground-floor retail space with work performed “in accordance with approvals” by the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers and the National Park Service, according to the Hotel Hotel permit request.

The unanimous decision to table action came during a quasi-judicial hearing held Monday. The board was unconvinced that, after almost 10 years of frustration and delays, that SAGA would deliver on their plans for the hotel, the Voice reported.

SAGA acquired the property in 2015. The hotel was built in 1926 and had been vacant since 2012.

Council members expressed frustration with the lack of progress in renovating the structure, and residents and business owners said the building was unsafe.

Pilots and other aircraft enthusiasts are encouraged to flock to Chowan County this fall for “Wings Over Edenton.”

The town is hosting the airshow to commemorate “80-ish” years of the Northeastern Regional Airport in Chowan County. The event is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19.

Offered to the public at no charge, an array of activities to entertain and engage attendees of all ages is planned, organizers said. Rain date is Oct. 20.

The skies will come alive at 1 p.m. with an aerobatic display by aircrafts, a Pitts Special and a T-6 Texan. Other demonstrations include parachutists, and possibly area aviators and first responders. There will be free plane rides for all ages throughout the day, as well as face painting, car and tractor shows, a small vendor fair with artisans and businesses, food trucks, Italian ice, plane displays and educational outreach.

The Northeastern Regional Airport was originally known as Marine Corps Air Station Edenton during World War II. The air station was handed over to the town in the decades that followed, and became a public-use airport. The first Wings Over Edenton was in 1993 as a 50th anniversary celebration. This year’s event will be the first since the COVID-19 pandemic began. 

“We are truly ecstatic for the return of Wings,” Public Information Officer Tyler Newman said. “This revival of a once classic area festivity will be a regional community event, a celebration of local aviation, and an open invitation for pilots from up and down the Eastern Seaboard to come taste what Northeastern Regional, and Edenton, have to offer. We cannot wait for October and hope to deliver something special to folks here in Northeast North Carolina and beyond.” 

All pilots who wish to display their aircraft must land by 9:15 a.m., no exceptions, and need to stay parked until 4 p.m. for the duration of the show. Those pilots who fly in and do not want to be on display may arrive anytime before the show or during, except from 12:40 to 2 p.m. when demonstrations are ongoing.

For information, contact tyler.newman@edenton.nc.gov or call 252-482-2155 ext. 535. For more information about Wings Over Edenton in general, visit www.townofedenton.com/wings.

Those white blades the length of a city block that have been at the North Carolina Port at Morehead City the last few weeks are destined for great heights.

Vestas, a wind turbine company based in Portland, Oregon, manufactured the onshore wind turbine components, which arrived in mid-March from India on cargo ships, including the 528-foot-long BBC Norway and 529-foot-long Basilisk, at the state’s deep-water port in Carteret County.

The 242-foot-long blades are for the roughly 6,300-acre Timbermill Wind, a 45-turbine energy facility currently under construction in rural Chowan County near Edenton. Timbermill Wind is a project of Apex Clean Energy in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Apex Senior Community Relations Manager Natasha Montague explained Wednesday that turbine components for the project are being delivered from Morehead City to the Riverbulk barge terminal outside of Edenton on the Chowan River. From there, they will then be transported to the wind energy facility site off Bear Swamp Road, north of Edenton.

The turbine installation is to start this summer, and the project is on track to start commercial operations in early 2025, Montague said. “Construction is well underway, with over 150 workers on site.”

The Chowan County location was chosen because it’s a verified wind resource, has existing onsite transmission lines and roads, expansive rural timber and agricultural lands, and it avoids sensitive military and environmental areas, according to Apex.

“The 45 wind turbines at Timbermill Wind will be capable of producing up to 189 (megawatts) of clean, homegrown energy, enough energy to power up to 47,000 homes every year,” Montague said.

There are monthly construction updates on the Timbermill website, she added. Recently, workers have been readying for the turbines to be delivered.

Timbermill Wind is expected to produce more than $80 million in direct economic benefits over the project’s 30-year lifetime,​ plus dependable long-term revenue for local farmers and landowners, Montague added. “Approximately $33 million will be paid in taxes to Chowan County taxing districts, making the project Chowan County’s largest taxpayer.”

Southern Alliance for Clean Energy Climate Advocacy Director Chris Carnevale explained to Coastal Review that wind energy is an important resource to use so “we all can have a reliable, low-cost, and environmentally responsible electricity system.”

Carnevale added that wind energy has a key role to play in a diverse portfolio of clean energy resources for providing reliable power 24/7.

“While we in the Southeast have mostly focused offshore for wind energy potential in our region, modern technology has made land-based wind energy, like the Timbermill project, a valuable opportunity that we should be taking advantage of,” Carnevale said. “Land-based wind farms, like Timbermill, not only provide reliable, low-cost power, but also serve as major sources of economic development and funding for rural communities and local residents.”

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Energy, Mineral, and Land Resources issued the permit for the onshore wind energy facility to Apex in March 2023. State officials said this permit is the first for a facility under a state law passed in 2013 that establishes a permitting program for wind energy facilities.

“Timbermill Wind has been a project of many ‘firsts’, and that’s a big deal. This project was the first in the state to receive approval from state regulators, which has helped to pave the way for future projects,” Southeastern Wind Coalition Program and Outreach Manager Karly Lohan said.

“Timbermill Wind is also the first project in North Carolina that achieved 40% domestic content for its manufactured components, allowing it to qualify for the 10% domestic content adder through the Inflation Reduction Act,” Lohan added. “This is just another example of how land-based wind development can invigorate North Carolina’s manufacturing supply chain and support economic growth across the entire state.”

In August, Apex and Google announced a power purchase agreement for the full 189-megawatt capacity of Timbermill Wind. This commitment, according to the announcement, is to support “Google’s 2030 commitment to powering its operations with carbon-free energy around the clock.”

Currently, North Carolina only has one commercial-grade onshore wind farm in operation: the 104-turbine Amazon Wind Farm U.S. East, powered by Avangrid Renewables, near Elizabeth City. The 208 MW facility, which has more than 500 workers, began delivering power in December 2016, and generates enough energy to power the equivalent of about 61,000 U.S. homes per year.

The Department of Energy has recognized the advantages and disadvantages of wind power.

Benefits are that the industry creates good-paying jobs, wind is a domestic resource that enables economic growth, benefits local communities, and is affordable, clean and renewable.

The challenges include competing with other low-cost energy sources, connecting the energy from the wind facility sites to where it’s needed, turbine noise and appearance, and impacts on wildlife.

According to a Global Wind Energy Council study released Tuesday, the United States is one of the top five markets for new wind installations, along with China, Brazil, Germany and India.

Worldwide, the wind industry has installed what the council said is a “record 117 GW of new capacity in 2023.” The council is a member-based organization made up of companies, organizations and institutions across 80 counties.

 “New installations in the onshore wind market passed the milestone of 100 GW while new offshore wind capacity commissioned last year reached nearly 11 GW, making 2023 the highest and the second-highest year in history for new wind installations for onshore and offshore, respectively,” states the Global Wind Report 2024. “116.6 GW of new wind power capacity was added to the power grid worldwide in 2023, 50% more than in 2022, bringing total installed wind capacity to 1,021 GW, a growth of 13% compared with last year.”

Currently, there are 16 active primary wind manufacturing plants in 12 states, and 450 wind-related manufacturing facilities in the United States supporting more than 20,000 manufacturing jobs.

Since the Inflation Reduction Act became law in August 2022, 123 new manufacturing facilities or facility expansions have been announced, the report states. This includes 12 onshore wind power manufacturing facilities, nine offshore wind facilities, 78 solar facilities, 20 grid-scale battery storage facilities or facility expansions and four grid connection facilities.

“From this total, 44 facilities have either completed or are currently under construction. Once all in operation, these 120+ facilities will support nearly 42,000 new manufacturing jobs.”

Edenton is an unusual center of historical tourism in the state. It is much larger than the preserved museum pieces that make up historic sites such as Bath and Halifax. But it is also far from the beach and lacks any large companies like the ones home to New Bern, Wilmington and Beaufort.

Instead, Edenton is a town of 5,000 that is Chowan’s county seat and has one of the largest groups of historic buildings in the state. After years of neglect that were remarkable for a town once billed as a colonial capital, Edenton’s historic legacy has propelled it over the past five decades and continues to define it into the 21st century.

Locals here have long recognized the importance of history to life in Edenton. Charles Boyette is a historical interpreter in downtown Edenton whose family has lived in the Albemarle Sound region for hundreds of years. He has been going downtown for decades for various reasons. Boyette said that for Edenton residents, “history is an everyday part of your life.”

Boyette would drive downtown to go to eat at nice restaurants or buy appliances. He recalls seeing historic names on every house and spending much of his childhood wondering who exactly lived in those stately mansions. This interest ended up leading to a career in historical interpretation, a field he has been in for over a decade.

Edenton came out of the early settlement of northeastern North Carolina. In the 17th century, farmers began to move south from Virginia to the area north of Albemarle Sound looking for better tobacco lands. They settled along the sound and its most navigable rivers, such as the Pasquotank and Chowan. As the English population grew in the area, the ruling Lords Proprietor were compelled to establish forms of government and other entities to aid with trade and tax collecting.

Along with the first North Carolina counties, the Proprietors allowed for the establishment of early towns. Edenton, founded on the confluence of the sound and Queen Anne’s creek, was the third town founded in the colony after Bath and New Bern. It was named after Charles Eden, an early governor of the colony who later became well known for his alleged friendship with the notorious pirate, Blackbeard.

Edenton continued to grow in size and significance throughout the 18th century. It became the first capital of North Carolina in 1722. The town was a port for the entire Albemarle region. Northeastern planters could load their batteaux full of tobacco and other supplies and send them down the Roanoke or Chowan rivers, free of impediments, to Edenton.

Consequently, the town became a center for sophisticated governmental buildings and political leaders. It is the home of North Carolina’s oldest courthouse, the Chowan County Courthouse, built in 1767 on the town green. It was also the residence for numerous governors and later senators.

Famous North Carolinians like Supreme Court Justice James Iredell, signer of the Declaration of Independence Joseph Hewes, and Gov. Samuel Johnston, who all called the town home during the 18th century.

Both men and women played important roles in the town’s history at this time. The women of Edenton launched a famous boycott of British tea in 1774, one of the most notable protests by women during the colonial period.

As the 18th century continued, the focus of settlement in North Carolina shifted to the south and west. The colony became less dependent on overland and river travel from Virginia. North Carolina began to cultivate other early ports and utilize the Neuse and Cape Fear rivers. An assortment of Scots-Irish, German and Scottish settlers began to use overland routes to populate the backcountry, further reducing the significance of the Albemarle region. Finally, Edenton was further isolated by a 1795 hurricane that deposited silt into the Albemarle Sound’s ocean inlet.

But Edenton remained an important town in the early history of the state. It was surpassed in population by other towns, dropping to the eighth largest town in the state by the 1860 census. But its coastal position and proximity to Norfolk meant that the city still retained a level of importance in the coastal region. It remained a center of shipping and water transportation, both along the coast and internationally. This location contributed to Edenton’s role in the slave trade. International and coastal slave ships plied the waters of the Albemarle and docked at Edenton.

Numerous enslaved people would work as pilots and seamen. One of these ships helped bring Edenton-born Harriet Jacobs to freedom. As a girl, Jacobs was abused by her enslaver and resolved to escape. She spent seven years hidden in a small crawl space before reaching a ship and finding her way to freedom in New York City. Her memoir, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” ended up becoming a bestselling book and an important piece of Southern literature.

Unlike other early Albemarle towns, Edenton retained enough statewide importance to become a strategic target during the Civil War. One of Edenton’s Confederate units, named the Bell Battery because it fired a cannon melted down from the town’s brass bells, fought at the battles of Fredericksburg and Kinston. The town was vulnerable once Gen. Ambrose Burnside successfully captured nearby Roanoke Island. It was invaded by the Union shortly after and held until the end of the war.

Following the war, Edenton embraced the agriculture industry and the new crops that became dominant in the region. It was a center for peanut growing and processing. Edenton gained a cotton mill in the 1890s, one of the first in the Albemarle region, according to the mill’s National Register of Historic Places nomination form.

Much of the mill complex and its village is still standing and now contains a museum. Edenton’s position on the coast and embrace of industry allowed it to retain a considerable amount of wealth for a coastal North Carolina town. This wealth is evident by the dozens of stately Victorian homes that dot the historic district, including the circa 1851 Wessington House at 120 W. King St. and a notable brick mansion at 205 E. King St.

The 20th century saw Edenton embrace its rich historic legacy in a way that few other towns of its size in the southeast had before. In many ways, the historic preservation movement in North Carolina began with a project in the town. The 1758 Cupola House, one of Edenton’s oldest houses and a site of state history, was slated to be torn down in 1918.

A local group, the Cupola House Association, purchased the property at 408 S. Broad St. and turned it into a local museum. Authors Mary Ann Coffey and Murphy Moss described the purchase as “the earliest community preservation effort in NC to save a historic structure.” The precedent of the Cupola House would be repeated numerous times throughout the state and helped pave the way for the creation of the historic preservation movement.

Historic tourism has emerged to become a significant part of Edenton’s economy. The downtown area is dominated by the Edenton Historic District and the numerous historic buildings that are open for tours by public and private groups. Edenton also has several downtown gift shops, restaurants and three historic bed and breakfasts, including the award-winning Inner Banks Inn.

The town was part of writer Joseph Cosco’s 1993 scenic tour of the Albemarle, of which he wrote, “Scattered here and there, almost always near the water, are the history-soaked mansions, merchant-class homes and county courthouses that served as a stage for the birth of both the colony and the nation.” Interest has only grown since then, with its historic district being featured numerous times on HGTV and in the New York Times.

There is uncertainty on the horizon for Edenton’s future. Like the rest of the Albemarle region, it has the potential to be a suburb of Norfolk. Interstate 87 has the potential to substantially reduce driving times between the Albemarle and the Hampton Roads area. Edenton is only 50 miles south of Suffolk, Virginia, a town that has grown by nearly 10 times since 1970. It has the potential to become a bedroom community, defined by large apartment complexes, chain stores, and subdivisions.

Despite this growth, there is hope here that state laws and the local love of history will preserve downtown Edenton as a center for the state’s historic heritage for generations to come.