A Short History of Plymouth & Washington County, North Carolina

Washington County sits on the south shore of the Albemarle Sound, where the Roanoke River finishes its long run out of the Piedmont and empties into brackish water. It is a small county — about 422 square miles, nearly a fifth of it water — and for more than two centuries its story has been the river's story: a port, a battlefield, a lumber frontier, a mill town, and now a quiet stretch of the Inner Banks known mostly for black bears and black water. If you're thinking about buying here, this history is not trivia. It explains why the street grid exists, why the housing stock looks the way it does, and why the prices are what they are.

A Port at the Mouth of the Roanoke

Plymouth was established in 1787, when a planter named Arthur Rhodes subdivided 100 acres of his Brick House plantation into 172 town lots on the south bank of the Roanoke, a few miles above the river's mouth. The location was the whole point: everything the Roanoke Valley produced — lumber, shingles, naval stores, farm goods — had to pass this spot on its way to the sound and out to sea. The North Carolina General Assembly designated Plymouth a port of delivery in 1790 and a full port of entry in 1808, making it one of the young state's official customs ports and a working commercial harbor through the first half of the nineteenth century.

The county itself came a little later. Washington County was formed in 1799 from the western third of Tyrrell County and named for George Washington, who had died that December. Its first seat of government was at Lee's Mill — present-day Roper — until the General Assembly moved the courthouse to Plymouth by special act on January 31, 1823, confirming what the river had already decided: Plymouth was where the county's business happened.

Somerset Place, and the History Under the Farmland

While Plymouth grew as a port, a very different enterprise was underway in the county's southern interior. In 1785, a partnership of investors that included Josiah Collins I — the Lake Company — acquired roughly ~100,000 acres of densely wooded swampland around Lake Phelps. To drain it and connect the lake to navigable water, the company brought 80 enslaved Africans directly from West Africa and forced them to dig a six-mile transportation canal by hand. Out of that canal grew Somerset Place, which over the following eighty years, under three generations of the Collins family, became one of the upper South's largest plantations, producing rice, corn, wheat, and other crops on the drained black soil.

There is no honest way to tell that story except plainly: by the state's own accounting, more than 850 enslaved people lived and labored at Somerset between 1785 and 1865, and the canals and drained fields that still define the south county's farm belt were built with their forced labor. Somerset Place is a State Historic Site today, and it is one of the most honestly interpreted plantation sites in the country — beginning in the 1980s, researcher Dorothy Spruill Redford, herself a descendant of people enslaved there, reconstructed the enslaved community's genealogy and organized a homecoming that brought thousands of descendants back to the site. If you buy land in the south county, you will be farming, hunting, or living on ground shaped by that history. The site is worth your visit before you close, not after.

War on the Roanoke

Plymouth's port economy made it a wartime prize. Union forces occupied the town early in the Civil War and fortified it as a base on the sound; a Union gunboat's shell burned the county courthouse to the ground during an 1862 bombardment. Then, in April 1864, Plymouth became the stage for one of the most dramatic episodes of the war in North Carolina.

The Confederacy had spent the previous two years building an answer to Union naval control of the sounds: the ironclad ram CSS Albemarle, constructed in a cornfield at Edward's Ferry on the Roanoke near Scotland Neck, under a nineteen-year-old contractor named Gilbert Elliott. On April 17–20, 1864, Confederate forces under General Robert F. Hoke — roughly 4,500 men against a Union garrison of about 2,500 under General Henry W. Wessells — attacked the town while the newly launched Albemarle steamed downriver. On April 19 the ram sank the USS Southfield, damaged the USS Miami, and drove off the supporting Union gunboats; the garrison surrendered on April 20, and roughly ~2,000 Union soldiers went into captivity, many of the enlisted men to Andersonville. The engagement is often described as the second-largest Civil War battle fought in North Carolina and the Confederacy's last major victory in the state.

The Albemarle's reign lasted six months. On the night of October 27–28, 1864, Lieutenant William B. Cushing brought a small steam launch up the river in the dark, rode it over the log boom protecting the ironclad at her Plymouth mooring, and detonated a spar torpedo under her hull — blowing a hole at the waterline, by one account, "big enough to drive a wagon in." The Albemarle settled into the shallows, Union forces retook Plymouth days later, and Cushing's raid entered naval legend as one of the most audacious small-boat actions ever carried out. You can walk this history downtown today: the Port O' Plymouth Museum, housed in a circa-1923 Atlantic Coast Line railroad depot, tells the story, and a 63-foot replica of the Albemarle sits on the river behind it.

The Lumber Era

After the war, the county's economy rebuilt around what it had always had in abundance: timber. The swamps and bottomlands of the lower Roanoke held vast stands of cypress and pine, and in the late nineteenth century industrial lumbering arrived to cut them. The clearest marker is Roper: the old Lee's Mill settlement — the county's original seat of government — took its modern name in 1890 from the John L. Roper Lumber Company, which established operations in the town. Rail lines followed the timber, tying Plymouth and Roper into the Atlantic Coast Line network, and for a couple of generations sawmill work and farming carried the county.

1937: The Mill

The single most important date in modern Washington County history is 1937, when the North Carolina Pulp Company opened a pulp mill on the Roanoke just outside Plymouth. The mill reorganized the town around itself — payrolls, housing, schools, retail — on a scale the old port and sawmill economies never approached. Weyerhaeuser bought the operation in 1957 and ran it for half a century; Domtar acquired it in 2007 and later converted the site to softwood fluff pulp — the absorbent material in diapers and hygiene products sold worldwide. The corporate layer has kept moving since: Paper Excellence acquired Domtar in 2021, and in October 2024 the combined group rebranded under the Domtar name. The mill still operates today, and it remains the county's economic anchor — a subject the brief treats at full length in The Mill Question.

Decline, and a New Identity

The second half of the twentieth century was not kind to small rural counties in eastern North Carolina, and Washington County was no exception. Mechanized agriculture needed fewer hands, the mill's workforce grew leaner and more automated, and the population drained steadily away. The 2020 census counted 11,003 people in the county — 3,320 in Plymouth (down 14.4% from 2010), 485 in Roper, and 207 in Creswell. The NC Department of Commerce's 2026 rankings place Washington County in Tier 1, the state's most-distressed tier, ranked 6th of 100 counties. Downtown Plymouth holds real bright spots and real vacancies, side by side.

But the county has spent the last decade building a genuine new identity out of the one resource that never left: the land and water. The Albemarle-Pamlico peninsula's bear population — which the county's tourism authority promotes as the world's largest black bears at the highest densities on the planet — became the foundation of a "Bearolina" visitor brand, and in 2015 Tom Harrison of the Washington County Travel and Tourism Authority created the NC Black Bear Festival, held each June on Plymouth's Roanoke River waterfront and now branded the National Black Bear Festival. A replica of the 1867 Roanoke River screwpile lighthouse went up on the revitalized waterfront in 2003; the Roanoke River State Trail, designated in 2024, runs some ~215 miles of paddle water past the town; and Pettigrew State Park, on ~16,000-acre Lake Phelps, remains the south county's quiet centerpiece, with ancient dugout canoes — some thousands of years old — recovered from the lake bottom.

What This History Means for a Buyer

Every era above left something physical behind that shows up in a purchase here. The port era left the 1787 street grid, the walkable downtown, and the historic district housing stock. The war left the museums and the waterfront's identity. The lumber and mill eras left Roper, the rail corridor, and the mill itself — with everything that means for jobs, taxes, and the occasional smell on a south wind. Somerset and the Lake Company left the drained, canal-crossed farm belt that defines the south county land market. And the long decline left the prices — the reason a genuine historic river town is still reachable on an ordinary budget. The brief takes it from here, chapter by chapter.

For Further Reading

The Port O' Plymouth Museum, run by the Washington County Historical Society in the town's 1923 Atlantic Coast Line depot on Water Street, covers the town's river-port and Civil War history, including the Battle of Plymouth and the CSS Albemarle, and hosts an annual Living History Weekend reenactment.

Somerset Place State Historic Site publishes its own detailed history of the plantation and the enslaved community, and Pettigrew State Park covers Lake Phelps and its archaeology.

Sources consulted include Somerset Place State Historic Site's published history, N.C. State Parks, the N.C. Department of Commerce county tier designations, U.S. Census figures, and standard published accounts of the Battle of Plymouth and the CSS Albemarle. Approximate figures are marked with a tilde; dates and institutional details verified against these sources where available.