First Assembly: Carolina's Earliest Legislature

In sixteen sixty-five, the first formal lawmaking body in Carolina met somewhere in this corner of what was then Albemarle County. The Lords Proprietors, the investors who held the charter for all Carolina territories, had appointed William Drummond as governor of the Albemarle region around that time. Drummond convened a gathering of elected deputies and councilors that the participants called the Grand Assembly of Albemarle, and in sixteen sixty-five they met to frame laws, set procedures for future assemblies, and respond to colonists' grievances about quitrent taxes owed to the proprietors.

The meeting was as much a negotiation as a legislature, with settlers pushing back against the proprietors' financial demands. From this small assembly of frontier planters near the Pasquotank River grew the institution that eventually became the North Carolina General Assembly, one of the oldest continuous representative bodies in the Americas.