Hertford County, North Carolina: History
Hertford County is home of the Meherrin Indian Tribe, descendants of indigenous people who had inhabited the region for many centuries. After decades of encroachment by English colonists, the Tribe moved south from Virginia, where they settled in 1706 on a reservation abandoned by the Chowanoke. This six-square-mile reservation was at Parker's Ferry near the mouth of the Meherrin River. It was confirmed by a treaty of 1726. However, they were not able to keep the reservation lands.
European explorers and surveyors visited the land in the late 1500s and 1600s. The first land grant to a European settler dates to 1703. Early settlers were of English, Scottish, Scotch-Irish, Irish, and French descent. They introduced a plantation system of agriculture. Between the eventual communities of Winton, Ahoskie, and Cofield, a community of nonwhite people arose in what would eventually be dubbed the Winton Triangle. The first recorded nonwhite landowner in the area dates to the 1740s.
A new county was first proposed by Representative John Campbell of the North Carolina colonial legislature on December 12, 1758, when he presented the body with a petition from area residents who were frustrated by the distances they had to travel to attend court sessions. Representative Benjamin Wynns introduced another bill in 1759 following the presentation of a second petition and it was passed and ratified as law on December 19, 1759, creating Hertford County from parts of Bertie County, Chowan County, and Northampton County, effective May 1, 1760. It was named for Francis Seymour-Conway, Marquess of Hertford. The county court convened at Cotton's Ferry until the town of Winton was incorporated upon land gifted by Wynns and designated the seat of government in 1766, and a courthouse was subsequently constructed. In 1764, the border between Hertford and Northampton was slightly altered. In 1779, parts of Hertford County were combined with parts of Chowan County and Perquimans County to form Gates County. In 1830 the original courthouse was burned, but was subsequently rebuilt.
Hertford's economy prospered in the Antebellum period, underpinned by slavery-supported agriculture and the use of the Meherrin and Chowan rivers as trade routes to southern Virginia. Murfreesboro developed with the construction of several large homes funded by the prosperity. The Chowan Baptist Female Institute was also created in the county in 1841. The 1860 U.S. census recorded the county's population at 9,504 people, of whom 47 percent were enslaved and about 12 percent were free people of color. …