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St Paul's Episcopal Church and
Early History of GravemarkersContributed by John Collins. January 2000
The parish was organized in 1701 as the first parish in the colony under the provisions of the Vestry Act of 1701. A post-in-ground church building was erected the next year on an undetermined plot of land just east of Queen Anne's Creek, on what is now known as the Hayes farm; Edenton would not be founded for another 11 years.
A decision to build the present St Paul's in town was made in 1736, and work commenced that year. There were considerable delays: the Vestry met in the building for the first time on 10 Apr 1760; the windows were unglazed until 1767; and the interior woodwork was not finished until 1774. The spire was added and the interior rebuilt in 1806-07. There was a fire on 1 Jun 1949 while the church was being renovated: fortunately the wooden flooring and box pews had been removed for the work, and thus survived. Because of this fire my wife had to be christened at home instead of in the church.
When Edenton was incorporated in 1722, two acres were set aside near the center of the town as the church lot and churchyard. Since the Anglican Church was established by law in the Colony, it was church responsibility to provide burial for the citizens of the town. Burials in the churchyard were taking place for more than a decade prior to the construction of the church commencing in 1736. Because there was no natural stone in the area, the earliest burials remained unmarked or were marked by either simple wooden markers, which deteriorated through the years, or brick vaults of one sort or another. Remnants of these brick vaults were removed in the 1960s. (This is probably when the Bond markers that were recorded as being next to the Church in 1952 disappeared.) While portions of the churchyard may now seem unoccupied for lack of gravestones, the yard is in fact full of graves, whether presently marked or not.
St Paul's remained Edenton's only white cemetery until the early nineteenth century, when the newly organized Methodist (1808) and Baptist (1817) congregations established graveyards adjacent to their buildings. Even so, the churchyard at St Paul's was being filled at such a rapid rate that in 1829 the Vestry passed several "Regulations respecting interments in St. Paul's Church-Yard, Edenton". The regulations provoked a storm of criticism, for the churchyard had always been the town cemetery, with free and unrestricted burials. By 1851 the Vestry was appealing to the Town Council to provide another cemetery. This did not occur until 1889, when the formation of Beaver Hill Cemetery on West Albemarle Street relieved the demand for burial space at St Paul's. Burial in the old churchyard was eventually limited to the descendants of families already interred there, and is, at present, restricted to local members who have their family buried there.
The burial history of Edenton's black citizens is sketchy. The records at St Paul's note that their slave members were either buried on the home plantations or in the Providence or Copse cemeteries. Local oral tradition about the site of the larger Providence Cemetery on an overgrown half acre of high ground overlooking Filberts Creek near the intersection of Albemarle and Mosley Streets was, in March 2000, determined to be accurate. Headstones have only survived on two of the graves: children of a free black recorded in the 1820 census. Records show that also buried there is Molly Horniblow, a free black who ran a bakery and tearoom on West King Street and was the mother of the famous autobiographer Harriet Jacobs. The Copse cemetery is believed to have been situated on Collins property in the vicinity of the Collins ropewalk, an area near the Edenton Cotton Mill. Vine Oak Cemetery on North Granville Street, which was unnamed until after title transferred from the Town of Edenton to the Chinquepin Chapel Cemetery Association in 1927, has been Edenton's African-American burial place since at least the mid nineteenth century. The exact date it commenced is unknown; all the early markers would have been wooden, so no longer exist.
I have been told that St Anne's Catholic Church (built 1858), one of only nine Roman Catholic churches in North Carolina at the outbreak of the Civil War and the only one still in use as an active parish church, was and remains the only integrated congregation in Edenton.
The oldest markers now in St Paul's churchyard were moved there in 1888.
Colonial plantation graveyards at Mount Mosely Plantation (Horniblow's Point), Moses Point, Sandy Point, Eden Plantation, Belgray Plantation, and Cabarrus Plantation (all in Chowan county) containing some of the earliest dated gravestones in North Carolina with death dates of 1704, 1705, and 1722, were washing into the Albemarle Sound, and in 1888 the Edenton chapter of the Colonial Dames moved them to St Paul's Episcopal Church, Edenton, and erected a plaque to identify these "Governor's Stones" - so named because they included the graves of three Governors under the Lords Proprietors: Henderson Walker (1660-1704), Governor 1699-1704; Charles Eden (1673-1722), for whom Edenton was anmed, Governor 1714-1722; and Thomas Pollock, Governor 1712-1714 and again in 1722. In Perquimans county, the Skinner and Blount family stones dating from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were moved from the family graveyard on Harvey's Neck to nearby Old Bethel Baptist Church.
The slate ledger of Colonel William Wilkinson (d. 14 Feb 1705) is among the stones moved in 1888.
While Edenton's signatory of the Declaration of Independence, Joseph Hewes, who died 10 Nov 1779 while attending the Continental Congress, is still buried in Christ Church Burial Ground, Philadelphia, PA, James Wilson (one of the nine Pennsylvania signatories, who died 28 Aug 1798 while visiting Samuel Johnston and was buried at the Hayes cemetery in Edenton) was exhumed on 20 Nov 1906 (newspaper clipping with photo in the Cupola House's museum room) and moved to Christ Church. Does anyone else think there was something amiss here, and Edenton should get Joseph Hewes back?
Sources for the above information:
Little, M. Ruth; Sticks & Stones: Three Centuries of North Carolina Grave Markers. Photographs by Tim Buchman (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1998) 0-8078-2417-8
Butchko, Thomas R.; Edenton: An Architectural Portrait (The Edenton Woman's Club, Edenton, 1992)
This is a 326 page hardback book which, while having as its subject 'The Historic Architecture of Edenton, North Carolina', also contains a wealth of information about the occupants of the buildings.Note: Redistribution in any manner requires permission of the contributor.
To obtain a copy by mail, send a check (payable to The Edenton Woman's Club) for $40 (which includes postage & packing) to Anne Graham Rowe, 120 W King St, Edenton, NC 27932.
For visitors to Edenton, it on sale in the Barker House (at the Edenton Bay end of Broad Street).
The Club is currently fund-raising for a similar book about the buildings in the countryside of Chowan county.
Copyright © 2000 Elizabeth Ross. 
