Pitt County, North Carolina

Finding Jesse Lewis in the 1830 Census of Pitt County, North Carolina, it now appears that a trip to Greenville, North Carolina is going to be necessary to discover anything else, if indeed there is anything out there to be learned. The Internet is a wonderful tool, and it's nice to sit in the comforts of home to learn things from it, but if nobody else has posted anything of value, hands-on research becomes the only way. So, a visit to the Rodman Library at Eastern Carolina University seems to be the next step. Meanwhile, here's a little history of Pitt County.


Greenville is the county seat of Pitt County, having been so designated in 1760 when Pitt was carved out of Beaufort County. Two of the five Pitt County courthouses burned, destroying most of the county records each time. The first fire was during the night of January 7, 1858 - the second on February 24, 1910. This, no doubt, accounts for the scarcity of information about the early settlers.

Greenville is located on the Tar River which flows southeasterly into Pamlico Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. It's easy to speculate that the young Jesse Lewis family, along with their Highsmith neighbors, boarded a boat at Greenville and proceeded about 12 miles to the Pamlico River, then entered Pamlico Sound where they headed south along the coast to Darien, Georgia. At Darien, they could have followed the Altamaha River inland to where they all settled in Wayne County, now Brantley. The water route would have been far easier than a trip overland in the 1830s.

A visit to Greenville may have some interesting sidelight adventure opportunities.