consideration. Should they meet with the approval of the Proprietors, they went into effect; if not, they were null and void.

In the fall of 1664, Governor Drummond began organizing the government of his new province; and on February 6, 1665, the "Grand Assembly of Albemarle," as these early law-makers styled themselves, met to frame a set of laws for this Albemarle Colony. The place chosen for the meeting of this first legislative body ever assembled in our State, was a little knoll overlooking Hall's Creek in Pasquotank County, about a mile from Nixonton, a small town which was chartered nearly a hundred years later.

No record of the names of these hardy settlers who were present at this Grand Assembly has been handed down to us; but on such an important occasion we may be sure that all the prominent men in the Albemarle region who could attend would make it a point to do so.

George Drummond and his secretary, Thomas Woodward, were surely there; George Durant, Samuel Pricklove, John Harvey, all owners of great plantations in Perquimans, doubtless were on hand. Thomas Raulfe, Timothy Biggs, Valentine Byrd, Solomon Poole, all large landowners in Pasquotank, must have been there; Thomas Jarvis, of Currituck, and Thomas Pollock, of Chowan, may have represented their counties. And all—the dignified, reserved Scotch Governor, his haughty secretary, the wealthy, influential planters and the humble farmers and hunters—must have felt the solemnity of the occasion and recognized its importance.

We may imagine the scene: Under the spreading boughs of a lordly oak, this group of men were gathered. Around them the dark forest stretched, the wind murmuring in the pines and fragrant with the aromatic odor of the spicy needles. At a distance a group of red men, silent and immovable, some with bow and arrow in hand, leaning against the trees, others sitting on the ground, gazed with wondering eyes upon the palefaces assembled for their first great pow-wow.

Down at the foot of the knoll the silver waves of the creek rippled softly against the shore; on its waters the sloops of the planters from the settlements nearby; here and there on its bosom, an Indian canoe moored close to its shores.

As to the work accomplished by this first Albemarle Assembly, only one fact is certain, and that is the drawing up by the members of a petition to the Lords Proprietors, begging that these settlers in Carolina should be allowed to hold their lands on the same conditions and terms as the people of Virginia. The Lords graciously consented to this petition, and on the 1st of May, 1668, they issued a paper known to this day as the Deed of Grant, by which land in Albemarle was directed to be granted on the same terms as in Virginia. The deed was duly recorded in Albemarle, and was preserved with scrupulous care.

There is a tradition in the county that the Assembly also took steps for preparing for an Indian war then threatening, which broke out the following year, but was soon suppressed.

Doubtless other laws were enacted, such as were necessary for the settlement, though no record of them is extant. And then, the business that called them together having been transacted, and the wheels of government set in motion, these early law-makers returned home, to manor house and log cabin, to the care of the great plantations, to the plow, and the wild, free life of the hunter and trapper; and a new government had been born.

There seems to be no doubt in the minds of such historians as Colonel Saunders, Captain Ashe, and President D.H. Hill, that the first Albemarle Assembly did convene in the early spring of 1665. As for the day and month, tradition alone is our authority. An old almanac of H.D. Turner's gives the date as February 6th, and in default of any more certain date, this was inscribed upon the tablet which the Sir Walter Raleigh Chapter Daughters of the Revolution have erected at Hall's Creek Church.

As to the statement that the place marked by the tablet was the scene of the meeting of our first assemblymen, tradition again is responsible. But such authorities as Captain Ashe, and various members of the State Historical Commission, accept the tradition as a fact. And all old residents of Nixonton assert that their fathers and grandfathers handed the story down to them.

An extract from a letter from Captain Ashe, author of Ashe's History of North Carolina, to the Regent of the local Chapter Daughters of the Revolution may be of interest here:

"Yesterday I came across in the library at Washington, this entry, made by the late Mrs. Frances Hill, widow of Secretary of the State William Hill: 'I was born in Nixonton March 14, 1789. Nixonton is a small town one mile from Hall's Creek, and on a little rise of ground from the bridge stood the big oak, where the first settlers of our county held their assembly.'"

Other documents in possession of the Regent of our local Chapter Daughters of the Revolution go to show that the place and date as named on the tablet at Hall's Creek are authentic, and that Pasquotank County may claim with truth the honor of having been the scene of the first meeting of the Grand Assembly of Albemarle.

CHAPTER III

ENFIELD FARM—WHERE THE CULPEPER REBELLION BEGAN

Some two or three miles south of Elizabeth City on the banks of the Pasquotank River, just where that lovely stream suddenly broadens out into a wide and beautiful expanse, lies the old plantation known in our county from earliest days as Enfield Farm, sometimes Winfield.

It is hard to trace the original owners of the plantation, but the farm is probably part of the original patent granted in 1663 by Sir William Berkeley, one of the Lords Proprietors, to Mr. Thomas Relfe, "on account of his bringing into the colony fifteen persons and paying on St. Michael's Day, the 29th of September, one shilling for every acre of land."

On this plantation, close to the river shore, was erected about 1670, according to our local tradition, the home of the planter, two rooms of which are still standing and in good preservation. Possibly "Thomas Relfe, Gentleman," as he is styled in the Colonial Records, was the builder of this relic of bygone days, whose massive brick walls and stout timbers have for so long defied the onslaughts of time.

Many are the stories, legendary and historical, that have gathered around this ancient building. Among the most interesting of the latter is that connected with the Culpeper Rebellion, an event as important in North Carolina history as Bacon's Rebellion is in the history of Virginia.

The cause of Culpeper's Rebellion dates back to the passing of the navigation act by Cromwell's Parliament, when that vigorous ruler held sway in England and over the American colonies. This act, later broadened and amended, finally prohibited the colonists not only from importing goods from Europe unless they were shipped from England, but forbade the use of any but English vessels in the carrying trade; and finally declared that inter-colonial trade should cease, and that England alone should be the market for the buying and selling of goods on the part of the Americans. Naturally the colonies objected to such a selfish restriction of their trade, and naturally there was much smuggling carried on, wherever and whenever this avoidance of the navigation acts could be made in safety.

To none of these thirteen colonies were these laws more injurious than to the infant settlement on the northern shores of Albemarle Sound in Carolina. The sand bars along the coast prevented the establishment of a seaport from whence trade could be carried on with the mother country. The large, English-built vessels could not pass through the shallow inlets that connect the Atlantic with the Carolina inland waterways. To have strictly obeyed the laws passed by the British Parliament would have been the death blow to the commerce and to the prosperity of the Albemarle settlement. So, for