By Miles Layton

EDENTON — The Edenton Town Council voted unanimously Tuesday to relocate Martinique — one of northern Chowan County’s oldest surviving homes and the birthplace site of one of North Carolina’s most remarkable slave narratives — to the town’s downtown waterfront.

Wanting to know more about Martinique’s past, I did some research. 

And I couldn’t help but think: If only there was a historic statue downtown, one that might remind folks of the Civil War and provide context about its causes – causes that directly affected Allen Parker’s life as a slave – that might complement Martinique’s past. 

Back to Parker — he was born at Martinique in 1838. For the first years of his life, he watched his mother rise before dawn to cook, clean and work the fields for the white families who hired her out year after year. He saw a man named Small knock her to the ground and beat her bloody. He carried dinner pails to white schoolchildren and quietly memorized the geography lessons he was forbidden to learn himself. And when the Civil War brought Union gunboats up the Chowan River, he crept to the riverbank in darkness, pried a chain loose from a tree, and paddled away from Martinique forever.

Parker’s 1895 memoir, Recollections of Slavery Times, records all of it — and historian David Cecelski has called it “one of the most important historical accounts of slavery and antebellum life on the North Carolina coast.”

The council’s vote came less than 24 hours after the Edenton Historic Preservation Commission approved the project’s conceptual site plan Monday night, clearing the way for council’s final authorization. The proposal would move Martinique roughly 18 miles from its current location in Rocky Hock to Colonial Waterfront Park near the Penelope Barker House, using Harbor Town’s grant funding.

Town Manager Corey Gooden said town officials and project partners have been quietly developing the concept since December while reevaluating Harbor Towns priorities and project costs.

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A Plantation, A Narrative, A Life

The debate over Martinique’s future has renewed attention to the story of the man born there. Cecelski, writing on his official website, places the narrative in stark terms.

“Parker was born in bondage at Martinique, a plantation in Rockyhock, a rural community east of the Chowan River and north of the Albemarle Sound,” Cecelski writes. “For the first 24 years of his life, he was held captive and hired out to different local white men a year at a time, almost as if he was a mule or a plow.”

Parker opens his memoir with a scene familiar to thousands of enslaved people across the antebellum South: the New Year’s Day hiring auction, held at crossroads where enslaved men, women and children were bid out to the highest offer for the coming year.

“It was customary in those days for those having slaves to let, to take them to some prominent place, such as a point where two roads crossed, on the first day of the New Year, and at a given hour of the day the slaves would be put up at auction, and let to the highest bidders for one year,” Parker writes.

He describes the physical conditions of slave cabins in northeastern North Carolina with careful, unsentimental detail — log walls chinked with clay, wooden chimneys plastered against fire, doors latched with pull-strings, windows without glass. Food rations were meager and fixed.

“The common allowance of a slave was four quarts of Indian meal and five pounds of salt pork, sometimes one quart of molasses, per week,” Parker writes, “and all the sweet potatoes that they wanted.”

Whatever else enslaved people needed had to be earned through overwork, barter or theft — and even stealing food from a master’s fields carried the threat of severe punishment.

Hired Out, Separated, Watching

Parker’s childhood was defined by separation and impermanence. Hired out alone before he was a teenager, he slept on a blanket spread over a floorboard with no family nearby. He worked under brutal overseers and under rare humane ones, hauling lumber through cypress swamps and driving oxen teams across the northern Chowan County landscape he had known since birth.

The violence of the system was never far. When Parker was small, he watched the man named Small beat his mother to the floor of their cabin.

“One day late in the fall Small got angry with mother and knocked her down, then getting over her he pounded her in the face with his fists,” Parker writes. “I was standing by my sister’s cradle and saw it all but of course could not do anything to help my mother.”

She fled to the woods. Parker and his sister were collected by their mistress. His mother was not required to return until Christmas.

Education was another form of exclusion. Parker carried dinner pails to white schoolchildren and lingered near the schoolhouse window.

“I would get there before school was out sometimes and would hear them singing their geography lessons, and it was not long before I knew some of these lessons by heart,” Parker writes, “but of course a slave child was not supposed to need any education.”

He also describes enslaved people developing their own intricate systems of communication and resistance — including a widely shared belief that owls served as sentinels, their calls warning field workers of an approaching overseer or master.

Escape on the Chowan

As the Civil War deepened and Union gunboats began appearing on the Chowan River, Parker and three fellow enslaved men — Joe, Arden and Dick, all the property of a man named Robert Felton — made their move.

One August night in 1862, after hearing a gunboat fire at four in the morning, they crept to the riverbank and found a boat chained to a tree.

“I told the other three men to get some sticks and march up and down the beach like soldiers while I took another stick with which I managed to pull out the staple that held the chain to the boat,” Parker writes, “thereby leaving chain and lock fast to the tree where it may be yet for ought I know to the contrary.”

They paddled out to the Union vessel in darkness. When hailed, Parker identified himself: “I told them that I belonged to Miss Annie Parker.” The captain gave the order to let them aboard. Exhausted, they were “soon fast asleep on the deck of the vessel.”

By morning, armed men and dogs had gathered on the shore. The gunboat’s captain ordered a shell fired in their direction. “They seemed to remember very suddenly that they had something to do at home,” Parker writes. “At any rate, in a very short time not a man or dog was to be seen.”

Parker enlisted immediately in the U.S. Navy, serving on a captured Confederate vessel called the Knockum for a year before eventually making his way north through New Haven and Worcester, Massachusetts, where he was working as a popcorn and candy peddler when Recollections of Slavery Times was published in 1895.

A Home for the Story

Supporters of the Martinique relocation have described the project as a preservation milestone for Edenton, whose colonial-era waterfront already draws visitors to sites connected to figures like Penelope Barker and James Iredell. Critics have raised concerns about waterfront obstruction, parking, the character of Broad Street, and whether Harbor Towns funds should be redirected from previously promised infrastructure improvements.

What has drawn less debate is the weight of what the structure carries. Martinique is not simply an old house. It is the place where Allen Parker was born into bondage — where his mother worked the fields and endured beatings, where the annual hiring auctions sent him away year after year, and where, finally, the war gave him a chance to walk to the river and not look back.

Cecelski has traced Parker’s life through census documents at East Carolina University’s Joyner Special Collections and through wills, estate records and deeds at the State Archives in Raleigh, assembling the documentary record around a man who committed his own story to paper so it would not be forgotten.

Another nugget of history about Martinique — John Wallace Winborne, a future NC Supreme Chief Justice, lived in the mansion as a boy. Winborne was born July, 12, 1884, on the old plantation of his maternal ancestors on Indian Creek in Chowan County, North Carolina, the son of Dr. Robert H. and Annie F. (Parker) Winborne, according to this website. He received his early education from his sister, Miss Pattie W. Winborne, at a private school she conducted on the Winborne farm near Holly’s Wharf on the Chowan River. He attended Horner Military School at Oxford, North Carolina, and then entered the University of North Carolina, graduating in June 1906 with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Winborne spent much of his life and career in the mountains, starting a law practice in Marion, NC, and later serving as a Supreme Court justice in Raleigh.

Whether Martinique belongs in Rocky Hock or on Edenton’s waterfront is now, by council vote, a settled question. What the structure carries with it — Parker’s birth, his mother’s suffering, the slow accumulation of a life lived in chains — travels wherever it goes.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Chowan County’s present is forever linked to its past. Everyone had different opinions on how best to recognize that shared history in a way that tells the complete story of the county and its residents.