Charles Town: The First Carolina Colony
Near Wilmington, North Carolina
Two miles east of this spot, on Town Creek near the Cape Fear River, stands the site of the first English settlement on the Cape Fear River. In the spring of sixteen sixty-four, a group of planters from Barbados led by a merchant named John Vassall sailed up the Cape Fear and established a town they called Charles Town, after King Charles the Second. Vassall had organized his colonizing company under the backing of the Lords Proprietors, the group of English noblemen who held the Carolina charter.
At its peak the colony counted about eight hundred settlers. But the venture struggled from the start. England's attention was elsewhere, internal quarrels weakened the community, and by sixteen sixty-seven Vassall himself reported the settlement abandoned.
The site predates the better-known Charles Town in South Carolina by six years.
