Albemarle — Edenton's Colonial Waterfront & Somerset Place

Often called the prettiest town in the South, Edenton was a colonial capital of North Carolina and a hotbed of Revolutionary defiance — home to the 1774 Edenton Tea Party, one of the earliest organized political actions by women in the American colonies. This two-day journey drives two and a half hours northeast to the tranquil shores of Albemarle Sound, where day one unfolds along a waterfront lined with Georgian and Federal mansions: the 1767 Chowan County Courthouse still in use, the elegant Cupola House, and the little Roanoke River Lighthouse restored on the water's edge. An overnight in one of the town's historic inns precedes a second day at Somerset Place, one of the largest plantations in the antebellum South, set beside the vast, mysterious Lake Phelps in Pettigrew State Park — a sobering counterweight to the genteel colonial charm, and a place that centers the more than 800 enslaved people who lived and labored there.