Page 73 - Foy

Virginia frontier, called Carolina, to Sir ROBERT HEATH. HEATH later
transferred the patent to others but before he did he allowed two French
Huguenots to plan a settlement between the Pamlico and Nuese rivers but that
plan never materialized.

As Virginia grew its population expanded southward and settlements slowly
began to appear in Carolina along the rivers . The territory’s name was changed
to Carolina and by the latter part of the 1600s a huge county called Bath with
indefinite boundaries around the Neuse River had been established.

Bath County was later subdivided into several precincts one of which was called
Craven, named for Lord CRAVEN of Combe Abbey. The date of the earliest
land transaction in the Craven region is dated November 26, 1702. On that date
land was purchased by one WILLIAM POWELL who became Craven’s earliest
known resident of record.

Between 1703 and 1711 one hundred seventy three land grants were secured in
Craven Precinct. Records of these and hundreds of other later land transactions
are available to researchers.

In about 1708 a group of French Huguenot families attempted to settle on the
Trent River. They had come from Manikintown, a settlement on the James River
in Virginia about twenty miles north of Richmond. Hundreds of these French
Protestants had come to the New World after the revocation of the Edict of
Nanes in 1685. Some of them settled at the turn of the century on the Pamlico
River in North Carolina and helped found the town of Bath. A larger group
settled on the James River in Virginia, twenty miles above the site of present day
Richmond,

The Virginia Council feared that a large concentration of religious refugees
would become a drain on the public treasury and decided to encourage the
Huguenots to “disperse themselves” to other places and made plans to assist
them to move out of Virginia to North and South Carolina. Most Huguenots
went with the Reverend PHILIPPE RICHEBOURG to the Santee River in South
Carolina but some came to the Trent River in North Carolina.

The Huguenot colony on the Trent River in North Carolina was short-lived and

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