end
court, military drills and other public gatherings. The General
Assembly passed an act providing for the erection of a new county, and
this county was named for Charles Pratt, Earl of Camden, a member of
Parliament and Chancellor, who in the stormy days of 1765 worked for the
repeal of the hated Stamp Act, and justice to the Colonies.

Before the long and bloody days of the Revolution proved his worth as a
soldier, Isaac Gregory had won a prominent place in the public affairs
of his county. His name first occurs in the Colonial Records in 1773,
when he was elected sheriff of Pasquotank. In the same year he was
appointed one of the trustees of St. Martin's Chapel in Indian Town,
Currituck County, a settlement whose citizens were many of them to
become honored in the civil and military history of our State.

Ever since the passing of the Stamp Act in 1765, low mutterings of the
storm that was soon to sweep over the country some ten years later had
disturbed the peace of the Thirteen Colonies; and events in North
Carolina showed that this colony was standing shoulder to shoulder with
her American sisters in their endeavor to obtain justice from England.

In 1774, John Harvey's trumpet call to the people of North Carolina to
circumvent Governor Martin's attempt to deprive them of representation
in the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, had resulted in the
convention at New Bern, the first meeting in America at which the
representatives of a colony as a whole had ever gathered in direct
defiance of orders from a Royal Governor.

The next year, in April, Harvey again called a convention of the people
to meet in New Bern. Again Governor Martin was defied; again, the North
Carolinians, taking matters into their own hands, elected delegates to
Philadelphia, and before adjourning, added Carolina's name to the
association of Colonies.

Pasquotank was represented in this convention by Edward Jones, Joseph
Redding, Edward Everigen, John Hearing, and Isaac Gregory. The last
named, being by now an acknowledged leader in his county, was appointed
by this body a member of the Committee of Safety in the Edenton
District.

The path toward separation from the mother country was now being rapidly
trod by the American colonies, though few, as yet, realized whither
their steps were tending. In the vanguard of this march toward liberty
and independence, North Carolina kept a conspicuous place. The Edenton
Tea Party in October, 17