First English Colonies

Winfall, NC

Quakers established the Old Neck Friends Meeting in the Albemarle region by 1680, making it one of the earliest organized religious communities in the North Carolina colony. From 1698 to 1785 it hosted the Society of Friends' Yearly Meeting, a central gathering for Quakers across the region, before the meeting was discontinued in 1797. The meeting house stood about a mile to the southeast.

Hertford, NC

In the first years after the Constitution was ratified, the young federal government needed officers to make its authority real in each state. John Skinner became North Carolina's first United States marshal, serving from 1790 to 1794, and as a Federalist he took part in the state conventions of 1788 and 1789 that weighed whether North Carolina would join the new Union. He lived on land about twelve miles southeast of Hertford.

Currituck County, NC

In 1728 surveyors set out to settle a long-running quarrel by marking the exact boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, running their line from the Atlantic shore some 220 miles into the western wilderness. The expedition, famously chronicled by Virginia planter William Byrd II, pushed through swamp and forest that few colonists had mapped. The line it drew still shapes the border today.

Edenton, NC

Henderson Walker rose through the small world of North Carolina's Albemarle region at the turn of the eighteenth century, serving as attorney general, judge, and vestryman before acting as the colony's governor from 1699 to 1703. His tenure came during the fragile early decades of English settlement, when colonial government and the established church were still taking shape. His grave lies just west of this marker.