Burning of Winton: First Town Torched in North Carolina

On February nineteenth, eighteen sixty-two, Union gunboats steamed up the Chowan River toward Winton, a small Hertford County town of about three hundred people. Confederate soldiers fired on the lead vessel, the USS Delaware, riddling its wheelhouse. The Union fleet withdrew, anchored downstream overnight, and officers decided the town should be burned in retaliation.

The next morning soldiers landed, ransacked homes, and torched the courthouse and much of the village. Winton became the first town in North Carolina to be destroyed by Union forces during the Civil War, a preview of the scorched-earth tactics that William Sherman would later systematize across Georgia and the Carolinas.