Roanoke Island Freedmen's Colony

Washington, NC

During the 1863 siege of Washington, North Carolina, roughly 100 Black men took up arms to help Union forces hold the town. Their service came even before the formal organization of the 1st North Carolina Colored Volunteers, making them among the earliest African Americans to fight for the Union in the state. They defended a community and a cause that promised their own freedom.

Dare County, NC

The Reverend Andrew Cartwright planted his first African Methodist Episcopal Zion church near here in 1865, as freedom came to the Albemarle region at the close of the Civil War. A tireless organizer, he built up A.M.E. Zion congregations across the area before serving as an agent of the American Colonization Society in Liberia. His life bridged emancipation at home and the movement to build Black institutions across the Atlantic.

Dare County, NC

This marker recalls the Pea Island Life-Saving Station, the only U.S. Life-Saving Service station ever crewed entirely by Black surfmen. Under keeper Richard Etheridge, appointed in 1880, the station's men patrolled the treacherous Outer Banks and rowed into storms to rescue shipwrecked sailors during an era of deep racial segregation. Etheridge, born enslaved and a Civil War veteran, ran one of the most disciplined and effective crews on the coast, and his surfmen carried out daring rescues that saved countless lives. Their station stood as a rare place where Black Americans held recognized, life-and-death authority.

Columbia, NC

Born in Tyrrell County in 1828, Edward Warren rose to become Surgeon General of North Carolina during the Civil War, directing the state's overwhelmed military medical care from 1862 to 1865. His restless career carried him far beyond the South — a professorship of surgery in Maryland, service as chief surgeon to the ruler of Egypt, and a final chapter in Paris, where he died.