The First Post Road

The road you are near once carried the first regular mail ever delivered across North Carolina. In seventeen thirty-eight, colonial postal officials opened a route from Williamsburg south to Edenton to extend the postal network into the Carolina colony. By seventeen thirty-nine, a continuous postal route connected Boston to Charleston for the first time, running once a month through towns including Edenton, Bath, New Bern, and Cape Fear before crossing into South Carolina.

The route passed near this very spot. Mail that once took months to reach the colonial interior now arrived on a predictable schedule, knitting the scattered settlements of eastern North Carolina into something resembling a connected society. The road fell into disrepair within a decade, casualties of war spending and the easier option of shipping letters by sea, but the continental ambition was already planted.