Winton Historical Association

09/02/2026

Learn about the history of the Longleaf Pine Forest and the production of pine based products (naval stores) that were central to the economy of NE North Carolina in colonial times and aided in economic recovery after the Civil War.

We invite you to hear a dynamic speaker, Earl Ijames, on Saturday, September 19th. Please join us at 1:00 pm at the Elks Shrine at 102 Hobson Reynolds Road in Winton where we will meet in the event center adjacent to the hotel.

Earl Ijames is Curator of Agriculture, African American, and Community History for the NC Museum of History.

08/20/2026

08/15/2026

08/07/2026

In 1665, colonists along the Albemarle Sound convened what's considered North Carolina's first representative legislative assembly, gathering under the authority granted by the Lords Proprietors just two years after the Carolina Charter had been signed. 📜 The assembly had real limits, its power constrained by proprietors living an ocean away in England, but it still marked the earliest moment settlers in the region had any organized say in how they were governed.

Records from those first sessions are thin, pieced together from scattered colonial documents rather than any single complete account, which makes the whole period feel more like rumor than history in some places. What is clear is that the assembly set a precedent for local governance that shaped how North Carolina's political identity developed over the next century, long before anyone was thinking about independence.

It's one of those foundational moments that rarely gets much attention, tucked more than a hundred years before the Revolutionary War NC story usually starts getting told. 🕯️

08/05/2026

Union Camp operated a river fleet of tugboats on the Chowan. Old Bridge Park in Winton is the site where logs were loaded and tugs were docked.

⏮🕰⏪ It's - we're going back to the 1900s on the Pasquotank River.

The tugboat "Clay Foreman" tows a load of timber on the Pasquotank River in the early 1900's.

📸Museum of the Albemarle Collection

08/02/2026

After years of war, a Tuscarora leader chose a different path. 🌾

King Tom Blount led the faction of the Tuscarora Nation that stayed neutral during, and eventually allied against, the bloodiest fighting of the Tuscarora War. When the war ended, that choice paid off in a way few Native leaders of the era achieved: in 1717, the colonial government granted his people a reservation called Indian Woods, along the Roanoke River in what's now Bertie County.

It wasn't a happy ending exactly. Indian Woods would shrink over the following century under pressure from settlers and land speculators. But for a moment, standing on that riverbank, Blount had secured something rare, a home his people could return to that was theirs on paper as well as in practice. 🏞️

His descendants and the Tuscarora who remained in North Carolina are still part of the state's story today, long after most surviving accounts of the era moved on to other things.

07/30/2026

Carbine Williams and Caledonian Prison…

07/28/2026

In the spring of 1862, Union forces set out to blow up the locks of the Dismal Swamp Canal and sever a vital Confederate supply route in northeastern North Carolina. Standing in their way was a small band of Confederates dug in near the little village of South Mills in Camden County. 🔥

Colonel Ambrose Wright's outnumbered men took position behind a ditch and a burning stretch of causeway, and for hours they held off a much larger Union column under General Jesse Reno. The Federals finally forced them back, but the delay had done its work. The Confederates withdrew in good order and the canal locks were never destroyed.

It was a small fight by the numbers, yet it protected a waterway that truly mattered and showed how a stubborn defense in the right terrain could blunt a stronger enemy. The swamps and canals of the northeast rarely make the headlines, but they quietly shaped the war along the coast. 🌊

So much of our Civil War story played out in these hidden corners. Does your family have roots anywhere in the Dismal Swamp country?