HistoricSiteMarkers
American Revolution

Edward Vail

Chowan County, Chowan County, North Carolina

Marker Inscription

Edward Vail 1717 1777. Colonial statesman and Brigadier General of the Edenton District militia. Member, N.C. Committee of Correspondence, 1768, 1773-74. Lived 2 mi. SW.

Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

The Story

Edward Vail was a colonial statesman who served as a brigadier general of the Edenton District militia and sat on North Carolina's Committee of Correspondence in 1768 and again in 1773-74. Those committees knit the colonies together in the years of mounting resistance to British rule, placing Vail among the local leaders who carried the Revolution forward. He lived about two miles southwest.

Why it matters

Vail was one of the provincial leaders who turned local grievance into organized revolution, linking eastern North Carolina to the wider American cause.

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Related people

  • Β· Edward Vail

Related events

  • Β· North Carolina Committee of Correspondence

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Chowan County Courthouse

Edenton, NC

Built about 1767, the Chowan County Courthouse is the oldest courthouse still in use in North Carolina and one of the finest Georgian public buildings in the South. During the Revolution it served as a gathering place for local Whigs who backed the Patriot cause. For more than two and a half centuries it has remained a working seat of county government.

James Iredell, Supreme Court Justice

Edenton, NC

James Iredell rose from colonial official to become one of the intellectual architects of the new nation's legal order. He served as North Carolina's attorney general during the Revolution and championed ratification of the Constitution, and in 1790 President Washington named him to the first U.S. Supreme Court, where he sat until his death in 1799. His Edenton home still stands nearby.

Barker House

Edenton, NC

The Barker House was home to Thomas Barker, North Carolina's colonial agent to England, and his wife Penelope, remembered as the reputed leader of the Edenton 'Tea Party' of 1774. That October, some fifty women signed a public resolution to boycott British tea and cloth, one of the earliest recorded political actions by American women. The house stands three blocks south, overlooking Edenton Bay.