Bath: North Carolina's First Town

The small waterfront community of Bath holds a string of colonial firsts. Incorporated March eighth, seventeen oh five, it was the first town chartered in North Carolina. By seventeen oh seven it had the colony's first grist mill and first shipyard.

In seventeen oh one, a library sent to Saint Thomas Parish here became the colony's first public library. In seventeen sixteen, Bath was designated North Carolina's first official port of entry, its harbor ideally suited for loading the pitch, tar, turpentine, and timber that the Royal Navy demanded. Chief Justice Christopher Gale lived nearby, as did the surveyor John Lawson, who wrote the first natural history of Carolina before being killed during an expedition in seventeen eleven.

Blackbeard himself once called Bath home between raids.