Edenton never became a very large town. The sloops and schooners and brigs which carried the wheat and corn and pork and lumber to the Northern or West Indian markets, could very often run up the deep creeks and inlets almost to the farmers barn, or to the lumberman’s camp in the swamp; and a few merchants were enough to do the limited business of a purely agricultural community. But from 1722 to 1743 the Assembly met here, with few exceptions, and the General Court was held here, so that it was the first settled seat of government. And even after the growth of the Province to the southward demanded a more central location for the government, Edenton still grew and prospered, and became a place of wealth and importance, and the centre of a society as cultivated and refined as could be found anywhere in the country. It was a port of entry, though the official title of the collector was Collector of the Port of Roanoke; and thither, in 1769, came James Iredell, a lad of seventeen, as deputy under his kinsman, Henry Eustace McCulloh. He afterwards became an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and had a county of North Carolina named in his honor. He was one of the most truly admirable characters in our history, and his correspondence is our richest mine of information concerning the social life of his times, as well as the most instructive view we have had left us of the civil and political history of the State during its sub-revolutionary period. He has left us a bright and pleasing picture of the old times in Edenton, when Samuel Johnston, Joseph Hewes, Charles Johnson and Hugh Williamson were its leading men, and, with the other notables of that region,--Blounts, Skinners, Hoskinses and others,--made up a society whose traditions remain and give to Edenton a distinction which time has not entirely destroyed. After it had long ceased to be the seat of government it retained to a considerable extent its prestige in all the northern section of the State, commercially and socially. Newbern, laid out by Colonel Thomas Pollock on his own lands about the time of the coming of De Graffenreid, was not incorporated until 1723. In 1738, Governor Gabriel Johnston called the Assembly to meet there, and in 1746 the Assembly designated it as the seat of government. With a few exceptions the subsequent sessions of the Assembly were held there during the continuance of the royal authority. Tryon, the first of the royal governors who wholly abandoned residence in the country, built his famous “Palace” there, in which he and his wife _sat_ while receiving their company, with an assumption of royal state which offended the pride of the Colonial gentry, who did not lack a sense of their own dignity.