A History of Colonial Port Bath, established August 1, 1715/16 sp checkedX

@2015 G Hookway-Jones MBA

Many North Carolinians know of Bath’s important role in the development of early colonial eastern Carolina, founded as the state’s first town in 1705/06. But did you know that it was also the state’s first official British-American Port of entry? Port Bath was one of North Carolina’s five original colonial Ports and one of sixty British-American ports in North America by the time of the American Revolution. Bath was a Port with a capital “P”, not just an ordinary small river port.

Because of the custom district’s pivotal role in what British-American economic history experts call the “Atlantic Economy,” both Port Bath and the channel to Ocracoke Inlet together forged a maritime commerce conduit. Through the conduit district coastal and oceanic vessels full of cargo, passengers, and mail sailed for almost ninety years, 1715-1790. Like a maritime sentinel watching over the gateway to Aladdin caves filled with import and export treasures, Port Bath monitored and issued open sesame vessel clearances to colonial and foreign merchants and their sloops, schooners, brigs and occasional very large merchant ships. Port Bath served the growing population as well as fueled economic development of the growing province. To protect merchants and the general public, the officials also referred violations of navigation and trade law to the court system, either the civil courts or the vice-admiralty court depending on the nature of the crime. Extraordinary piracy violations of maritime law, like the court case of Blackbeard’s crew following Blackbeard’s death November 1718, were referred to Virginia or South Carolina’s admiralty court.

We know from 1715 Colonial Assembly legislation that a Bath courthouse and market was ordered to be built, and the water frontage between Main Street and Bath creek, (then known as Water Street and Old Town Creek) was to be kept free of residential structures, only public structures and merchant related cellars or warehouses were allowed. In the early days there were no wharves, only sandy landings to beach working craft like canoes, rafts, and small sailing work boats like kunnars, periaugers and shallops. Larger sailing vessels would rest on moorings in deep water, tie up to large trees, or periodically come in to be careened on the sand for bottom cleaning and repair. There was a town pen for livestock delivered by sailing vessel and the Bath/Core Point ferry. Old Bath towne had a surrounding fence shown on maps as late as 1769; the Edenton road entrance had two town gates, one for horses and pedestrians and a larger one for wagons and coaches. There was a town common on a Back Creek savannah to graze livestock and a law was issued “no hogs and shoats running in the streets!” The Bath Courthouse was built by 1722 and prior to that year lawmakers met in one another’s homes or in one of the Bath Taverns. The 1769 Sauthier map of Bath shows the waterfront, numerous houses, St. Thomas Church built 1734, a courthouse and jail location. The 1807 Forbis map of Bath shows five wharves and ferry landing although neither map indicates a Market or Customs structure. Some believe the courthouse may have served double duty on market day as well as a customs house, used by public officials like the town clerk and surveyor, and by port officials like the customs collector or naval officer when vessels arrived. The Sauthier and Forbis maps together show that the town grew somewhat in accordance with John Lawson’s original 1706 town plan but not exactly. (See town plan drawings in the Bath County Deed Book, Vol. 1).

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Even though located inland on the Pamlico River, approximately fifty miles from Ocracoke Inlet and the Atlantic Ocean, Bath was issued its first commissioned port customs collector as early as 1703, a few years before the town received its town charter. James Leigh and his wife and family arrived from London in 1704 and Leigh was sworn into office by none other than Christopher Gale, Bath resident and North Carolina’s first chief justice. Leigh bought a plantation on the south side of the Pamlico River not far from the Bath-Core Point Ferry and road to New Bern: he deputized collector Capt. William Barrow to serve on the river’s north side. As the region grew in importance, Bath was declared the county seat for the very large Bath County extending below Albemarle, the state’s first county, from Ocracoke west to the Piedmont and south down to Cape Fear.

After the fall 1715 biennial colonial Assembly session, Governor Charles Eden sailed to London with copies of laws passed, hand-carrying a petition to the eight Lords Proprietors, Carolina overseers since a 1663 land charter from King Charles II. The petition stated that the inhabitants of the province felt the best seaport town location for a new official colony port of entry was Bath. Below is a drawing by Edward Moseley from 1708 showing the newly established town of Bath on the peninsula between Bath and Back Creeks as it would have looked before Eden was named Governor. The map shows the plantations of several local planter-merchants including James Leigh, Christopher Gale and Governor Landgrave Daniels.

Image: 1708 Moseley map section, Lambeth Palace’s Sixty Treasures, Four Hundred Years 2010 Exhibit Catalog, London.

The eight Lords Proprietors from St. James Palace in London issued a proclamation August 1, 1716 declaring Bath to be North Carolina’s first “seaport town,” the official port of entry for all vessels sailing in and out. At the same time they sent congratulatory letters to Governor Charles Eden and to the North Carolina colonial government of the era. All three were dated August 1, 1716 but because of a change in the calendar system there has always been uncertainly about 18th century dates. Today historians often say Bath was established 1705/06 and Port Bath was established 1715/16.

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Bath’s inland location was actually an advantage during the early 18th century due to threat of invasion by foreigners and native Indians. Bathtowne’s palisaded location on twin creeks on high bluffs of the peninsula minimized unexpected Tuscarora, Matchapungo, and other local Algonquin attacks. Most importantly for economic growth, the 1715 jurisdiction of the original Port Bath district included two large navigable rivers, the Pamlico and the Neuse, and all tributaries, which allowed maritime commerce participants to freely buy and sell, load and unload sailing up and down coastal waterways deep into the rural “southern frontier” shortly after their vessels “crossed the bar” at Ocracoke Inlet. The shallow sound waters discouraged large or small predatory Spanish and French ships who could not navigate past the barrier islands without local knowledge or paying for a local pilot. Unlike Charleston’s and Hampton’s large Atlantic ports provisioning deep water merchant vessels and large British warships, only vessels less than 250 tons could easily enter into the Pamlico Sound, so the role of British customs officials and naval officers in North Carolina was even more important than in other colonies. Smugglers and pirates with smaller faster shallow draft vessels could easily hide once entering the sound. Corner-cutting sea captains might quickly pick up and drop off undisclosed cargo, called “breaking bulk”, at plantation and river landings on any one of eastern Carolina’s many creeks. There were no duties payable between North and South Carolina imports and exports but all other shipping activity had to be reported to port officials.

As the frequency of Albemarle County vessel clearances dropped using the first two original northeast ports, Port Currituck and Port Roanoke, a result of Currituck and Roanoke Inlets filling with sand and “shoaling up,” the importance of the next alternative, Ocracoke Inlet route to the town of Bath, heightened. Port Bath was especially critical in the eyes of the original Albemarle and Bath County merchants squeezed by the Virginia embargo prohibiting shipment of North Carolina tobacco. A salt shortage also required Bath county residents and farmers to deliver hogs and cattle in big livestock drives to Virginia for slaughter and subsequently salt packing in barrels for export. Plantation owners, merchants, tradesmen and housewives as well felt squeezed by a shortage of coin and silver to cover the high prices of imports, especially re-exports of manufactured goods from the mother country carried by New England traders. London Proprietor overseers and foreign and wealthy merchants from other colonies heard the complaints of Carolina inhabitants who found that the buying power of North Carolinian money, even using bartered goods in lieu of coin, was cut in half by New England trader monopoly of import goods, especially short in supply were tea, sugar and spices, English and German textiles and iron or other metal crafted farm tools, even nails, marked up anywhere from 200-600%. North Carolinian shipbuilding and merchant activity was encouraged through concessions on duties as well as additional incentives for shipbuilding and payments per pound add-ons to encourage shipping of tar and naval stores, especially during and after Queen Anne’s War which ended with the Battle of Utrecht in 1713. In 1720 Joseph Boone and John Barnwell, agents for South Carolina in a letter about Port Bath to the Lords Proprietors said “Trade is carried on by small sloops from New England who bring them cloathing and Iron wear and exports Pork and Corn. Of late they made about 6000 barrels of pitch and tarre which the New England sloops carry first to New England and then to Great Britain.”

Both British and provincial officials agreed on the importance of monitoring vessels and trade closely, especially the quality and quantity of exports going in and out of the Pamlico Sound, the biggest inland

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body of water on the east coast of the thirteen original colonies. The Port of Bath and customs collection districts through all the English colonies were established to maximize import/export revenues for the mother country: they were set up as a means to standardize and enforce trade and navigation regulations passed by British Parliament and the Board of Trade. This meant both proprietary and royal-owned colonies in early America, Canada, and island plantations in Bermuda, Bahamas, and the West Indies were all divided into territorial jurisdictions. With a system of checks and balances dictated from London, customs collections officers, comptrollers and naval officers ensured information was sent to the London Customs House. The reports and shipping lists included names of vessels, owners and captains, tonnage volumes, port of origin and destination, vessel crew and cargo details as well as payments of duties or taxes. The economic theory of the day was called Mercantilism, also known as Bullionism. The theory involved the mother country keeping as much silver and gold at home as possible and accepting only raw goods and commodities from dependent colonies in exchange for exports of manufactured/finished goods. Navigation and trade Acts were passed by Parliament to that effect as early as the 17th century.

London’s first Custom House was built 1275, and rebuilt in 1378 and 1559. Destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, a new Custom House was built by Sir Christopher Wren 1669-71. That one suffered severe damage after a gunpowder explosion in 1714, and the Custom House was rebuilt on Wren’s foundations in 1717-25. Port Bath and the other 18th century North Carolina port customs records and reports would have been sent to both the Custom House built by Wren and the newer one built on Wren’s foundations. (Sir Christopher Wren built St. Paul’s Cathedral and the “newer” Ripley’s Custom House burned down in 1814).

Depending on the amount of coastline to monitor and the volume of shipping each of the original 13 colonies were divided into assigned port jurisdiction districts, anywhere from one to nine customs districts with respective ports of entry. North Carolina by the middle of the 18 th century had five colonial customs districts, going from north to south: Port Currituck, Port Roanoke, Port Bath, Port Beaufort and Port Brunswick/Cape Fear. Both Port Bath and Port Brunswick kept their names after relocating to Washington and Wilmington, respectively.

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In the absence of roads and overland transport, maritime commerce in the Port Bath district during its first decades supported all of the southeast population growth along the coastal Plains- from the Albemarle Sound down to the Cape Fear River; this bought time for new colonial ports with deep water ocean access to develop and support more trade along the coast and into the interior. Port Beaufort was created 1722 and in 1729 the proprietary period ended making North Carolina a royal colony, and Port Currituck, Port Roanoke, Port Bath and Port Beaufort royal customs collection districts. Port Brunswick/Cape Fear was created 1731 expanding growth up the New Hanover and Onslow County and on to Fayetteville. Also secondary customs collection centers developed in growing towns such as New Bern. As sea captains tired of horseback treks from New Bern on poor roads through swamps with long ferry crossings complained about the long route to show papers to Port Bath collectors, eventually New Bern and the Neuse river basin were reassigned from Port Bath jurisdiction to Port Beaufort district in 1730. Port Bath carried on with a reduced jurisdiction until Port Washington was created a Continental federal port and impost collection district in 1790… all of which provided additional open sesame for merchants into the interior of the state, eventual development of the Piedmont, expansion into the mountains of North Carolina and onward into eastern Tennessee.

Both Port Bath customs officials and commissioned naval officers monitored compliance of sailing vessels and merchant shipping with respect to both British and provincial colonial navigation and trade law. This meant checking vessel registration papers and cargo bill of lading papers and collecting duties on vessel cargo tonnage as well as collecting special duties on enumerated items such as sugar, molasses, or tea. After 1776 the Port Bath Customs Collection District name continued to appear on shipping lists and naval officer reports long after the American Revolution and up until March of 1790.

Although the small town of Bath never grew much beyond the outlines of John Lawson’s 1706 town plan, Bath’s courts, area taverns and local plantation owners supported regional government officials, port public officials and port tradesmen who in turn supported the local and regional merchants, visiting merchants from other colonies, and foreign merchants from England, Ireland, Scotland. Because so many of the plantation owners and farmers were self-sufficient in Beaufort Precinct, the precursor to Beaufort County, many inter-colonial merchants who bought investment lots in Bath town never built homes in the town nor opened stores. The majority of merchants and peddlers were known to have sold cargo out of vessels, merchant cellars, or on market day by the courthouse out of horse and mule drawn wagons.

Port Bath was an important port of call for sailing vessels, especially those hailing from another colony or country. Sea captains were required to clear customs and at the same time could provision food and water for crew, pick up or unload cargo, make repairs with the local shipwright, and pick up or discharge mail and passengers before carrying on along the coast, going offshore, or going inland up one of the big rivers. Port Bath offered important services like reliable scales, goods inspections, warehouses, ship bonds and reliable public official witnesses for bills of sale, promissory notes, wills and third party powers of attorney for travelling merchants, passengers, sea captains and mariners.

Although Bath trade shipping records do not survive for most of the first half of the 18 th century, it appears from the numbers of Bath merchants who owned or chartered sailing vessels and owned

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plantations and town lots in Bath (as listed in the Beaufort County Deed book Volume I 1696-1729, the Beaufort County Genealogical Society 2003) that both Port of Bath and Town of Bath’s public officials certainly offered an adequate amount of commerce and legal infrastructure suitable for sea captains and planter-merchants alike, both newcomers and established wealthy merchants. Port Bath provided enough amenities to in effect buy time for new roads to develop and newer ports and other new towns to grow around new economic hubs and transportation routes. Port Beaufort and Port Brunswick on the Cape Fear far outstripped Port Bath in shipping volume by mid-century and the newer towns of Halifax, New Bern, Wilmington, Greenville, and Tarborough in turn grew and developed infrastructure to support more and more significant inter-colonial riverine and/or oceanic trade. Once the threat of pirates, Indians and foreign invasion disappeared and once a network of roads linked the state to the 1730 Post Road from Boston to Charleston and Savannah, Bath’s importance as a vital cog in the machinery of colonial economic growth waned. After midcentury, surviving port records show Port Bath usually coming in third or fourth place in shipping volume out of the five colonial ports. Its peninsular creekside location became inconvenient and its port baton was passed to both Wilmington for ocean going trade and passed upstream to Washington for local, regional, and West Indies trade.

The once convenient role of a town located halfway for a change of horses and a tavern meal between Edenton and New Bern or located halfway between Williamsburg and Charleston for an extended visit with the North Carolina Governor or Executive Council or regional Court proceedings soon became redundant once the Post Road and plank roads made land travel to towns with more amenities more convenient and comfortable. Wagon and carriage designs with improved spring suspensions also made longer trips more tolerable. Bypassing Bath by sea and land was accelerated after 1770 when Tryon Palace was built in New Bern. Even the port collector Robert Palmer eventually moved to New Bern as in support of Governor Tryon as Crown Clerk and Provincial Secretary, after serving as Lieutenant General in a 1768 Regulator expedition. After 1770 Sir Robert Palmer deputized his son William as port collector. By the end of the eighteenth century Bath and Port Bath’s role as the first seaport town, the first official Customs Collection district and the first British Port of Entry became somewhat forgotten footnotes in North Carolina’s economic history.

Shortly after the American Revolution, the official port of entry customs office shifted a few miles upstream to Forks of the Tar, on land sold to the Bonner family that was originally part of Bath merchant Thomas Worsley’s plantation. Forks of the Tar was later renamed Washington by 1776 and the new town was incorporated in 1782. Its federal court building, built 1787, is the second oldest in the state and is still in use today as a town library although the second floor impressive court room is only used for storage. Port Bath’s last known Customs Collector residing in both Bath and Washington was Capt. Nathan Keias. Keias, originally from Rhode Island, became a lifelong resident of Beaufort Precinct. Nathan Keias and his wife are buried at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Washington not far from the grave of his neighbor and fellow Port Bath Commissioner, the highly successful merchant and land-owner John Gray Blount. Keais’s direct descendent was Edmund Harding, a great supporter of the Bath’s historic site and of Beaufort County historic preservation.

Like ripples from a stone thrown in a millpond, the 1716 royal proclamation establishing Port Bath led to the old Bath County expanding: the population doubling and tripling in just a few decades. By 1776 the

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old Bath County had splintered and exploded into at least fifty other counties by the time of the American Revolution. By 1790 the Port Bath district vanished with only a small village of the same name remaining with a link to the old county and the old port district. Today all 100 of North Carolina’s counties, even seven in Tennessee, are derived from one or the other of the two now extinct old counties of Albemarle and Bath.

The Port Bath Customs Collection district lasted almost ninety years. During those years Port Bath served as a good steward of both local and regional maritime channels of trade, literally protecting the channels between Ocracoke Inlet with buoys, beacons and dredging, training and regulating use of Ocracoke pilots, and figuratively sending audited records of vessels and imports and exports to provincial government leaders with copies sent to the London Customs House and Board of Trade. Duties were often paid in barter goods and swan shot, or gun shot and monies (for example three shillings per ton) and duties collected were used to protect the port and maintain the channels. The town had a self-perpetuating panel of five local port commissioners that served to support the Port Bath customs officials and naval officers. The longest serving Port Bath official was Scottish Robert Palmer, a successful Bath merchant who served almost twenty years in the customs collector post 1753-1772. During his early term, in 1755 Governor Dobbs complained about trade and smuggling… “the sound within is so large with many numerous Navigable Creeks on each side in Albemarle Sound, Pamticoe, and Neuse Rivers that they (ships) discharge…cargoes, spirits, wine and prohibited goods before they come to the discharging ports.”

Vessel types, tonnage/size: Sailing vessels of up to 250 tons (burthen or burden) were known to have cleared at Port Bath, but according to Port Bath surviving records from the NC State Archives average sailing vessels were much smaller. Typical riverine sloops and schooners were in the 30-40 ton range drawing usually under five-six feet, to maximum of eight feet. Vessel tonnage capacities from Port Bath shipping lists prior to the American Revolution ranged as follows: one-masted sloops minimum size 10, average 33, (max. 95 tons), two-masted schooners minimum size 6, average size 41 (max. size 126 tons), larger brigs/snows minimum 40, average 80 tons, and largest merchant ships minimum size 90, average size 136, (and max. size 250 tons).

Vessel ports and cargo: Port Bath customs officials cleared in/and out vessels and cargo going to and coming from the original 13 colonies as well as numerous destination foreign ports in the West Indies and West Europe, even as far as Gibraltar and Morocco. Records from 1761-1790 show Port Bath’s top Inbound (From Whence) ports were the commercial ports of Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, Baltimore, Boston, St. Eustacius (St. Kitt’s demerara sugar) Cape Francais, and Turks Island (salt). Its top destination port clearances (Outbound destinations) were New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Boston, Rhode Island and St. Eustacius.

Unlike other ports that may have been known for one or two key exports, like rice or grain, Port Bath’s imports and exports cargoes were of a varied nature. Port Bath’s top imports in descending importance from the shipping list tonnage included: sugar, merchandise, molasses, salt, coffee, wine, linen, tea, woolens, in ballast, chocolate, gin, brandy power, dry goods. Port Bath’s cargo listings of top exports in

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descending order of importance were: shingles, naval stores, staves, lumber, pork, rum, tobacco, skins, merchandise, tar, sugar, scantling, corn, salt, peas, and hides.

A portion of Port Bath taxes collected was sent as donations to the seamen’s hospital in Greenwich outside London. Below is an oil painting by Caneletto of the Greenwich Hospital and vessels on the Thames River in 1743. Retrieved from http://www.wga.hu/support/viewer_m/z.html

Fortunately many of the shipping lists and Port Bath customs collection district records from the second half of the 18th century have survived shedding light on this important period of our state’s colonial maritime history. Also the imposing Palmer-Marsh House once owned by customs collector Robert Palmer and originally built 1741 by Bath merchant Michael Coutanche has been preserved and today is part of the Bath State historic site. The site’s visitor center and historic home tours are open to the public seven days a week.

Resources: Angley, Wilson. Port Bath, North Carolina, in the Eighteenth Century: A Compilation of

Records. Research Report, Division of Archives and History, Raleigh, August 1981 McCusker, John and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607-1789. Merrens, Harry. Colonial 18th Century North Carolina, 1964.

18th c Colonial Carolina Maps: John Lawson 1709 http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/lawson/ill3.html John Homann 1714 Hand colored Map http://www.learnnc.org/lp/multimedia/6069 Edward Moseley 1733 ECU Joyner Library Map of Carolina with Inset of Ocracoke

Approach through Inlet http://oldesttowns.blogspot.com/p/bath.html 1769 Sauthier map of Bath http://www.nchistoricsites.org/bath/sauthier.htm

Visitor InformationHistoric Bath207 Carteret St. P. O. Box 148

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Bath, NC 27808Phone: 252-923-3971 Website: www.bath.nchistoricsites.org Email: bath@ncdcr.gov

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