Saint Paul's, Edenton: The Colony's Oldest Parish

Near Edenton on Albemarle Sound stands Saint Paul's Episcopal Church, whose congregation is older than the building and whose building is older than the nation itself. The parish traces to the Vestry Act of seventeen one, colonial legislation that divided North Carolina into five church districts, each authorized to tax landowners and build places of worship. In December of seventeen one the local vestry met at a private home and decided to raise a church on land donated by Edward Smithwick.

Construction on the present brick building began in seventeen thirty-six, making it the second-oldest church building in North Carolina and the only colonial church still in regular parish use. The walls have been hosting Sunday services, in one form or another, for nearly three hundred years.

What makes Saint Paul's remarkable is the congregation list. Joseph Hewes, one of North Carolina's signers of the Declaration of Independence, worshipped here. Doctor Hugh Williamson, a signer of the United States Constitution, was a member. James Iredell, appointed by George Washington as one of the original justices of the Supreme Court and, at age thirty-eight, its youngest member, sat in these pews. The founding era's most consequential legal and political arguments were sharpened in this small waterfront town.

Edenton itself was settled in the late sixteen hundreds and was for a time one of the most important ports in the Carolina colony, a hub for tobacco and naval stores shipped along the Sound. In seventeen seventy-four, Edenton women organized what historians call the Edenton Tea Party , a documented colonial-era women's political action, possibly the first of its kind in America, in which fifty-one women signed a resolution pledging to boycott British tea and cloth.

Saint Paul's has stood through all of it, its brickwork worn but intact, still the center of the oldest surviving congregation in this state.