Bertie County

Looking out on the Chowan River, I see another cool, grey, and drizzly day. A steady northeast wind is making the water choppy. It’s been a cool spring and it seems we’ve gotten more rain than usual, although no doubt the farmers are thankful. You might even say it’s been a bit of an English spring, which somehow seems appropriate for the story to follow.

On this day in 1584, which was 439 years ago, British sea captains Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, guided by Portuguese navigator Simon Fernandes, were sailing across the Atlantic from England in two tall ships financed by Sir Walter Raleigh and his friends. The captains and their crews, including a few, well-educated specialists such as artist John White and scientist Thomas Harriot, were headed for North America to explore and find a suitable spot for an English colony. They left England on April 27 and after stops in the Canary Islands and the Caribbean, they arrived at the Outer Banks, ironically, on July 4, 1584.

How long have people been living around here, i.e., the land around the Albemarle Sound and the major rivers that flow into it— the Chowan and Roanoke?

Searching for a credible answer, I read about recent findings of archaeologists across America. Reporting what I’ve learned might make this column a bit “geeky,” but please bear with me; my stories will “heat up” considerably once I get to the time of European exploration. At that point, I’ll be able to draw from first-hand, personal accounts of some transformational events and very human stories that set a very different direction for our locale and for America as a whole.

In a follow-up article to Chowan River Ramblings by Robert (Bob) Forbes, he wanted to share additional information concerning his interest in Native American artifacts in the Chowan River area.

He is asking for information concerning any found Native American artifacts in or around the Chowan River. If so, I’d like to see photos of the same, along with the location of the finding if you want to share that information, you can contact him at rhforbesjr@gmail.com. Here is a photo of some of the artifacts he has found on his family farm near the Tar River; the penny is for size reference.

Greetings, readers, from the western bank of the Chowan River in Bertie County! I’m pleased to be asked to contribute to the Edenton Gazette. I anticipate, expect, and hope that this is the first of a series of columns that will be largely about the deep history of human occupation along the banks of our beautiful Chowan River, interspersed with current news and observations from my vantage point along the mighty Chowan’s western shore.

As a resident of the Black Rock neighborhood just across the Edenhouse (aka “Highway 17”) Bridge in Bertie County, I realize that I am writing mostly to Chowan County readers from across the river. That is like admitting, especially to the Edenton residents among you, that I live “across the tracks,” but I hope you will not hold that against me, too much.

Also, I hope you’ll not hold against me that I’m a relatively new resident of the area, having moved here in February 2019 after my semi-retirement from an environmental engineering career based mostly in Charlotte, where I could conveniently fly to project sites around the country and overseas. I say “semi-retirement” because I still have an email address from my employer of some 40 years, and they occasionally ask me to do a little “work” on behalf of my company and profession. Even my Linked-In profile says that I am “ready to work, a little.”

After four years in semi-retirement, those “work” requests from my soon-to-be former employer are thankfully becoming fewer and farther between. This allows me to devote my time to more important tasks such as fishing, gardening, doing whatever my wife tells me, and hopefully, writing more about my lifelong interest in the history of eastern North Carolina, a subject on which I have some credibility. The only downside of retiring completely from my profession is that I may soon have to give up my company’s laptop computer and tech support, but is that not a small price to pay for freedom?

Back to my credibility concerning local history, I was born and raised on a Pitt County farm along the Tar River, about an hour’s drive from my current abode in Bertie County. That farm, part of which my brother and I still jointly own, was acquired by our great-great-great-great grandfather, John Forbes, around 1740 as part of a land grant from the Lord’s Proprietors of the Colony of North Carolina.

Research into the scant information I have found so far on my paternal ancestor, John Forbes, shows that he did government work for the Colony of North Carolina. He was officially the Colony’s Deputy Surveyor-General, right up until his untimely death in 1750. He also performed official duties as Clerk of Bath County for several years. His name shows up at the bottom of many colonial deeds in his capacity as land surveyor, and it appears on quite a few other documents in his capacity as County Clerk. His compensation for fulfilling those duties came not
in the form of money, but instead, in the form of land.

As I mentioned, my brother and I still own a small sliver of the land that was granted to our ancestor, John Forbes. That land is mostly in the Tar River floodplain, so putting any houses there would not be prudent or even permissible. But the deer, wild turkey, and wood ducks love the place, among other less desirable wildlife, such as snakes, deer flies, ticks, and swarms of mosquitoes in the warmer months of April through October.

I still like to walk around our land from November through March, but I must remember to wear orange in deference to the Sam Branch Hunt Club, which leases our land every hunting season, much to the chagrin of our deer-loving neighbors at the Ironwood Country Club. Too bad for them; the deer and their hunters were roaming our land way before those suburban neighbors moved in next door.

Based on a bit of circumstantial evidence, I believe that my colonial ancestor, John Forbes, may have grown up in North Carolina’s Albemarle County, which in the early 1700’s covered the so-called “finger counties” that have since been named Currituck, Camden, Pasquotank, Perquimans, and Chowan.

A man named John Forbes shows up as a witness to a will in Albemarle County in 1683, and I believe he may have been the father or grandfather of my confirmed ancestor, also named John Forbes, a civil servant to the Colony of North Carolina. That is as far into the past as I have managed to trace my ancestry so far, but I am still looking, and I plan to keep you posted on any significant findings along the way.

It is time to wrap up this opening chapter before I lose your attention, but not before I divulge my plans in general for what I hope to be a long series of columns. I plan to take us back to the times when the lands around the Chowan River were inhabited by Native Americans, followed by early European explorers, followed by colonial land grabbers and their laborers (many of whom, regretfully, were enslaved), followed in turn by all their descendants and other wanderers who worked, played, lived, and died in these parts.

They left some amazing stories, many of which have been largely forgotten along the way. My plan is to resurrect and retell some of those forgotten stories for you, dear reader. Please wish me luck and providence.