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,