It may be interesting to review its history. The earliest notice of it dates back to the explorations of Raleigh's colony in 1584, when they visited an Indian town named Newsiok, 'situated on a goodly river called the Neus,' but the adventurers did not examine the river, and more than a century elapsed before any further record of the visit of white men occurred. The north-eastern counties had, however, been partially settled by refugees from Virginia, where in the absence of law and gospel they became as degraded a community as there was on the continent. Their descendants have, to a considerable extent, overrun the South to the Mississippi and on to Texas. But it was the good fortune of the counties on the Neuse to derive their immigrants from and to have their institutions formed by a better class than the inferior families of Virginia, further degraded by a residence in Eastern North-Carolina, at that period known as the harbor for rogues and pirates. The earliest settlers on the Neuse were French Huguenots, who first located on the James River, in Virginia, but were afterwards induced by the proprietors of Carolina to accept grants of land in what is now known as Carteret County, to which place they removed in 1707. In 1710 a colony from Switzerland and Germany, under the management of Baron de Graffenreid and Louis Michell arrived, and were settled between the Neuse and the Trent, and in the triangle formed by these rivers, laid out a town with wide streets and convenient lots, which in remembrance of the capital in the Old World, was called New-Bern. The settlers who already resided north of New-Bern soon rebelled against their local government, and by continued depredations on the Indian tribes in their vicinity at last brought on a fearful war, during which a large part of both the white and red men were exterminated, so that many of the poor Swiss and German Protestants found they had only escaped their vindictive persecutors at home to find a bloody grave in the forests of Carolina. After the surrender of their grant to the crown by the lords proprietors of Carolina, in 1729, a better state of affairs succeeded, and a more energetic government, with its blessings and prosperity was the result. The country was then settled and Newbern gradually rose to be a place of importance, and subsequently the capital of the province. The first printing-press in the province was established in 1764, and the first periodical, _The North-Carolina Magazine_, issued the same year, but it is doubtful if any book excepting the State laws was ever published there. A public school was incorporated the same year, and Newbern became the principal seat of education and social intelligence in the province. As the seat of government and the residence of the royal Governors, it attracted much wealth, and developed a degree of culture which it has retained to a later day.