The First Post Road: Mail Comes to North Carolina

Near this spot in seventeen thirty-eight and thirty-nine, the first road carrying regular mail through North Carolina was carved through the forest. It was part of an ambitious colonial postal project: a continuous route linking Boston in the north to Charleston in the south, passing through every major settlement along the Atlantic seaboard.

Alexander Spotswood, the colonial Deputy Postmaster General and a former Virginia governor, ordered the initial road cut from Williamsburg south to Edenton in seventeen thirty-eight. Within a year, the South Carolina Gazette recorded that a continuous mail route now ran from Boston to Charleston, with carriers departing on the twentieth of every month. The road wound through what are now Edenton, Bath, New Bern, and Brunswick County before crossing into South Carolina. It was the communications backbone of the colonies, binding together governments and merchants who had previously communicated only by private messenger or chance encounter. The road fell into disrepair during the wars of the seventeen forties and fifties, but the postal habit it established endured, eventually becoming the foundation for the United States postal system.