Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/270

 Bath, incorporated in 1705, was never more than the inconsiderable village which it is to-day. The first town to become of any importance was Edenton, looking southward from a gentle elevation at the head of a beautiful little bay on the north side of the upper end of Albemarle Sound. Over against this bay the broad mouths of the Chowan and the Roanoke brought her the trade of the back country, and down the sound and across the shifting bars at Ocracoke and New Inlet a little fleet of schooners and brigs began to carry on trade coastwise and with the West Indies, and presently across the ocean.

The facetious Colonel William Byrd of Westover visited Edenton in 1728, and tells us that its forty or fifty houses were mostly small and poor, and that only the better sort had brick chimneys. He says that the Court House looked like a tobacco barn, and that it was, as he supposed, the only "metropolis" in the world which had no house of worship of any kind, and no religious teacher or minister. This may have been true as to the corporate limits of the town, but we know that a church had been built at "Queen Anne's Creek," the former name of the point where Edenton