Historic Albemarle tour explores North Carolina's past

CRESWELL, N.C. -- More than two centuries after Josiah Collins and two partners started carving fields and farms out of the swampy wilderness of northeastern North Carolina, a visit to Somerset Place provides a glimpse of the human toll of plantation life.

Collins and his partners sent a ship to Africa's West Coast in 1786 and brought back 80 slaves with the expertise to grow rice. The slaves dug canals to drain the swampy land and to allow boats to ship harvests to the Albemarle Sound six miles north, then out to the wider world. The plantation eventually encompassed up to 100,000 acres -- making it the state's third-largest slaveholding plantation -- and produced rice, corn and wheat.

The plantation is one of 32 historic, cultural and natural sites spread across 15 northeastern counties that make up the Historic Albemarle Tour, a self-guided driving tour of the state's past. The region includes some of the state's most remote locations -- the Outer Banks and towns around the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds.

Historic sites abound

The area's best known historic site -- the Wright Brothers Memorial in Kill Devil Hills -- isn't on the tour. Instead, the path winds mostly through small towns like Windsor, Halifax, Corolla and Jackson -- places that hope to entice vacationers heading back and forth from the Outer Banks to stop for a short visit and contemplate other aspects of North Carolina's past.

At Albemarle, infectious diseases were so prevalent that the plantation built its own hospital, with a full-time physician who treated residents of the slave quarters and the big house alike. Once measles or dysentery broke out, residents could die a dozen at a time, no matter their race or social class, said Dot Redford, who manages the state historic site located at the former plantation.

Other stops on the tour include Washington County's Plymouth, population 4,000. A pamphlet promoting Plymouth takes a deliberately modest approach, asking tourists to give the town a mere five minutes.

The short drive through Plymouth -- founded in 1787 by four New England investors intent on harvesting the area's lumber, shingles and naval tar and turpentine -- leads visitors past an 1832 United Methodist church and a home that retains bullet holes from the Civil War.

Those with more than five minutes to spare can check out the CSS Albemarle, a floating 63-foot replica of a Confederate ironclad that cruises the Roanoke River for a half-hour beginning at noon each summer day.

Plymouth was the site of a three-day Civil War battle in 1864 in which the 158-foot original ironclad helped drive Union forces from town, preserving a railroad supply lifeline from Wilmington, the only significant Southern port still in Confederate hands, to the South's capital city of Richmond, Va.

Going way, way back in time, the Aurora Fossil Museum, in the Beaufort County town of the same name, displays five rooms of fossilized bones, teeth, shells and coral pulled from the nearby PCS Phosphate mine.

On Hatteras Island, the Frisco Native American Museum & Natural History Center has a collection of artifacts and displays highlighting the culture of the island's original inhabitants and that of Indian tribes across the United States.

In Manteo, costumed actors copping a period English dialect explain the boredom, terrors and labors of mariners and colonists aboard the Elizabeth II. The vessel berthed in Roanoke Island Festival Park is a reproduction of a 16th century ship similar to one used to transport the first British colonists to North Carolina's shore in 1585.