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Kip Shaw for Edenton, N.C.
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Kip Shaw for Edenton, N.C.
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Photo by Glenda Booth
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Kip Shaw for Edenton, N.C.
The Captain's Quarters Inn in Edenton, N.C.
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Kip Shaw for Edenton, N.C.
The Captain's Quarters Inn in Edenton, N.C.
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Photo by Glenda Booth
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Kip Shaw for Edenton, N.C.
Roanoke River Lighthouse
From a worn cardboard box under the Byrum True Value Hardware’s cash register, Jean Byrum Brown pulled out two stapled-together, three-by-five-inch index cards, one for the bride and one for the groom.
The anxious customer, a cousin of the groom, had three hours before the wedding on the town green to buy a gift and asked to see the bridal registry. After a quick scan, he disappeared into the store and returned in two minutes with a sawhorse.
“Well, I can’t wrap that, but I can put a bow on it,” Brown chirped.
This is quintessential Edenton, North Carolina, population, 4,800.
Brown, an Edenton native, is a third-generation member of the Byrum family running the hardware store founded by her grandfather. She knows her customers’ first names. “We’re friendly. We know how to welcome people,” she commented.
Peggy Ann Vaughn, wife of former mayor Roland Vaughn, concurred: “Everybody knows everybody and cares about everybody."
"We are so friendly we have two visitor centers,” bragged Nancy Nicholls, tourism director.
Edenton was once described by a travel writer as "the prettiest small town in the South," and the name has stuck.
Not only is Byrum’s hardware a symbol of small-town hospitality, its variety store section is a cornucopia bursting with thousands of items: Ribbons, craft supplies, decorations, North Carolina sports memorabilia, sewing notions, Pyrex dishes, gardening tools, show-er heads, sillcocks, bike helmets, you name it. The bridal registry dates from the 1940s and Byrum’s even stocks samples of crystal and fine china for couples. It’s a bulging-at-the-seams curiosity shop, much more welcoming and touchy-feely than the Walmart 30 miles away.
PRETTY AND HISTORIC
Tucked into the western end of Albemarle Sound, 70 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, Edenton boasts colonial history, water-oriented recreation and many restored Victorian, Georgian and Federal-style homes.
“We don’t tear down. We save or move them,” explained Nicholls. The walkable, one-stoplight main street, Broad, is lined with mom-and-pop boutiques sporting homemade signs for the upcoming wild game cookout, spaghetti supper and pork chop fundraiser. Daily live-narrated trolleys chug around town, introducing visitors to the waterfront, mansions, late-1900s cottages and inviting front porches. Blount’s Drugstore serves fresh-squeezed orangeade and limeade. The Steamers baseball team sports a clam logo.
A PROUD HISTORY
Sir Walter Raleigh explored the area in the 1580s. In 1712, the state legislature designated Edenton North Carolina’s first capital, a time when the town docks were a bustling, cotton and tobacco shipping center. (The more central Raleigh became the capital in 1792.) In 1819, President James Monroe dined on the second floor of the Chowan County Courthouse, built in 1767, the oldest government building in North Carolina.
In 1842, Harriet Ann Jacobs, born into slavery in Edenton, hid in an attic for seven years and dressed as a sailor, sailing north to freedom on the maritime underground railroad. She wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl under a pseudonym.
Edentoners love the story of their other “female rebellion” in 1774, told today in the Penelope Barker House’s “Women of Distinction” exhibit. Barker organized area women to sign a letter to King George protesting his tea taxes, a brazen move that generated a British satirical cartoon that caricatured them, labeled them “treasonous” and carped that they should be tending to their wifely, domestic duties. On the town green, the 250-pound bronze Edenton Teapot perched on a Revolutionary War upright cannon memorializes their bold protest.
The 1758 Cupola House, topped by a cupola for ventilation, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its Prussian blue, Georgian woodwork includes wainscoting, mantles, pediments and moldings, some of which are reproductions because the original was sold to the Brooklyn Museum. Slaves likely lived in the much plainer upstairs.
For more “modern” history, the Mill Village Museum details how the Edenton Cotton Mill from 1898 to 1995 employed 100 at its peak, worked in hot, dusty conditions and made cotton into yarn, supplying the U.S. armed forces in World War I, among others. It is the heart of Mill Village, once 70 modest bungalows where the 400 worker families lived. Exhibits describe close-knit village life and milling equipment. The last batch of yarn made there is displayed.
ON THE WATER
Captain Mark Thesier, Edenton Bay Cruises, regales his passengers with history, boating lore, flora, fauna and local miscellany. Passengers learn about the invading Union troops’ shenanigans when they occupied the town in the Civil War and strategies of enslaved people who escaped on boats. Today’s boaters often see ospreys, black bears, white tail deer and red wolves.
The Roanoke River Lighthouse displays the keeper’s furnishings and tools of the trade, including a crank radio used to communicate. The lighthouse is the screwpile type, perched on a platform underpinned by a “screw” on the bottom twisted into the river bottom. It was moved from one-half mile offshore.
SHOPPING
Broad Street’s unique shops, many woman-owned, offer much “retail therapy.” Feathers sells women’s clothing in their “preloved” section and racks for curvy girls and “working mamas.” Finders Keepers offers hand-painted furniture and décor. Downtown Diva sells jazzy tops, bottoms and rompers. The Polka-Dot Palm, a self-described “hip gift boutique,” specializes in “cute.”
DINING
The Edenton Bay Oyster Bar on Pembroke Creek touts crispy-fried oysters, fried oyster salad and oysters with pimento and ham. The house-made pimento cheese is rolled with sweet baby gherkins in country ham. Creamed collards are popular.
Dining on the wraparound porch of the Cotton Gin Inn, a B&B surrounded by tall trees and gardens, might invoke your Scarlett O’Hara fantasies. While waiting for your Rhett Butler, imaginary or otherwise, you can munch on lightly fried chicken with remou-lade sauce, homemade biscuits, fried-green tomatoes, arugula salad and a scrumptious dessert of Charleston coconut cake with custard. The brick two-story was built 1900, is on the National Register of Historic Places and claims to have the only brick out-house in North Carolina.
There’s also plenty of classic American and Southern cuisine, pizza and sandwiches around town. Eager eaters can work it all off at the Edenton Bay Trading Company’s Vinyl Night, an outdoor, rollicking, twist-and-shout dancing joint with live disc jockeys playing actual vinyl records non-stop.
Lodging favorites include many elegant B&Bs in former homes near downtown. One choice is the Greek-Revival-style Captain’s Quarters Inn built in 1907. Innkeepers Diane and Don Pariseau serve lunch and dinner. Don makes his own sausages and bread and smokes trophy-winning BBQ ribs. On their spring and fall “mystery weekends,” guests venture out on scavenger hunts around town.
Edenton smacks of small-town warmth and exudes friendliness at every turn. “Here, if you have five people in front of you at the stoplight, we have a problem, a traffic jam,” quipped Linda Tiller, a local.
