New Bern: The Colonial Capital at the River Crossroads

When a Swiss baron named Christophe von Graffenried arrived at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent rivers in seventeen ten, he was running from financial ruin in Europe and hoping to build a utopia in the New World. He brought with him several hundred Palatine Germans and Swiss settlers, named the settlement after Bern, the capital of Switzerland, and drew up a plan for an orderly city at the meeting of the rivers.

The Tuscarora nearly destroyed it within a year. In September seventeen eleven, Tuscarora warriors attacked the young settlement in what became known as the Tuscarora War, killing more than a hundred colonists and capturing von Graffenried himself, who negotiated his own release by agreeing to remain neutral. The colony survived, and New Bern grew into North Carolina's most important town.

By seventeen forty-six it had become the colonial capital, and in seventeen seventy, Royal Governor William Tryon completed the grandest building in colonial North Carolina: Tryon Palace, a Georgian mansion designed as both capitol and governor's residence. It was the first permanent colonial capitol in the colony and later the first state capitol of North Carolina. Within its walls, the First Provincial Congress met in August seventeen seventy-four, the first such provincial congress convened by any of the thirteen colonies, making New Bern one of the earliest flashpoints of the American independence movement.

The city held a string of firsts: North Carolina's first printing press arrived here in seventeen forty-nine, producing the colony's first newspaper. The first tax-supported school in the colony, New Bern Academy, opened in seventeen sixty-four. When the Civil War came, Union forces captured New Bern in March eighteen sixty-two and held it for the rest of the war, making it a refuge for thousands of enslaved people seeking freedom. The Trent River Settlement, established in eighteen sixty-three on land along the river's south bank, became one of the largest freedmen's colonies in the occupied South.

The bears on New Bern's coat of arms are a nod to Bern, the city of bears, carried across the Atlantic by a ruined Swiss baron who managed to build something lasting.