County Wide

Edentonians and visitors alike eagerly await the Steamers’ summer collegiate baseball season. Home games crank up for a weekend chock-full of excitement. Going to a game is a fun family event and an enjoyable experience for sports fans of all ages. For some avid supporters, a Steamers’ game is the main social event.

Locals can meet the roster of talented players at the ballpark on Wednesday, May 31st at the FREE Fan Fest event prior to the home opener. Fans can welcome players to Edenton, get autographs, and play cornhole at the ballpark. Courtney Phelps, the team’s athletic trainer comments on this year’s team,
“players represent programs across the country, but we have several local players who are playing college ball at Pitt, Duke, and Mt. Olive.”

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.

A funny thing happened over the Covid years of avoiding large groups …..With special permission, University researchers were granted time to work with the Chowan Edenton Environmental Group to conduct outside laboratory work. 

We followed specific protocols of masking and safe-distancing while the work of filtering samples and collecting data continued throughout the summers of 2020 and 2021.  The Chowan Edenton Environmental Group worked with aerosol researchers on a special project designed to measure air particles (2.5 μm in diameter or PM2.5) that might be given off during an algal bloom.  These tiny particles are the size that gets into our lungs and can be the cause of respiratory problems.

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.