Bath: The First Town in North Carolina.

Bath: The First Town in North Carolina. By Alan D. Watson with Eva C. (Bea) Latham and Patricia M. Samford. (Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Office of Archives and History, in association with the Historic Bath Commission, c. 2005. Pp. [xiv], 153. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 0-86526-318-3.)

The town of Bath, North Carolina, located on the Pamlico River near where the river empties into Pamlico Sound, was incorporated in March 1705 (according to the Old Style calendar). A year-long commemoration (so as to accommodate New Style adherents) marked the the town's tercentenary with a series of events and programs in the town and its environs. Alan D. Watson's new book provides the historical context for the early significance of Bath. Of living practitioners of the history of colonial North Carolina, only the prolific William Stevens Powell has exceeded the younger Watson in useful publications. Bath is fortunate to have Watson turn his attention to it.

Better than four-fifths of Bath: The First Town in North Carolina deals with the period before the American Revolution. An epilogue brings Bath into the twenty-first century, but the town (which, as one visitor noted in 1745, was never larger than thirty or so houses) began to decline steadily because of competition from New Bern and Wilmington during the 1740s. When the legislature designated nearby Washington as an official customs port in 1790, Bath was no longer much visited by maritime commercial traffic.

Near the time Bath incorporated, a growing tension existed between older settlers around the Albemarle Sound to the north and newcomers engaging in the profitable Indian trade around the Pamlico. By 1708 supporters of Governor Thomas Cary in Bath County ranged themselves against Albemarle settlers. Soon Cary's Rebellion erupted, the Tuscarora War followed shortly after, and, until 1715, there was some real concern that European settlement in North Carolina might shrink to insignificance. Watson provides the best brief overview of the complexities of the Cary Rebellion now in print. Likewise, he succinctly outlines the society of the small port town.

The most useful chapter for scholars is the one entitled "Economy," which includes informative tables on exports, ship tonnages, destinations, and ports of origin for ships using Bath. Watson created the tables from customs records from the British Public Record Office in London.

Eva C. (Bea) Latham and Patricia M. Samford, members of the professional staff at the state-owned Historic Bath site, contribute worthwhile sidebars drawn from court records, early maps, and archaeological research reports. Any visitor to the Bath historical complex gets a palpable sense of the colonial past, and on-scene people like Latham and Samford make that possible. To read Watson's text while visiting Bath only heightens the lessons offered there.

WILLIAM S. PRICE JR.

Meredith College