Edenton, North Carolina

The town of Edenton is located on the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina's Inner Banks region. It is the county seat of Chowan County. The population was 4,397 at the 2020 census.

Edenton served as the second official capital of North Carolina, during the colonial era as the Province of North Carolina, though other than housing the governor's official residence, it did not have other governmental functions. It served as capital from 1722 to 1743, when the capital was moved to Brunswick. The town was the site of the Edenton Tea Party, a protest organized by several Edenton women in 1774 in solidarity with the organizers of the Boston Tea Party. It was the birthplace of Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved African American whose 1861 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is now considered an American classic.

In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Edenton was the site of a controversial and heavily reported sexual abuse trial and overturned conviction, what ultimately became North Carolina’s longest and most costly criminal trial — during what has been described as a period of widespread day-care sex-abuse hysteria.

Edenton's local economy is primarily driven by tourism, and as a popular retirement location.