Samuel Swann and the First Printed Laws of North Carolina

Samuel Swann served as Speaker of the North Carolina colonial Assembly for most of the years between seventeen forty-three and seventeen sixty-two. A plantation owner whose home stood about a mile south of this spot, Swann led the lower house through a period of near-constant conflict with royal governors. His most lasting achievement came in seventeen fifty-two, when he oversaw the compilation and printing of the first complete revisal of North Carolina's laws, a volume known ever after as Swann's Revisal.

It was also the first book printed in the colony. Bound in leather that yellowed with age, it came to be nicknamed the Yellow Jacket.