For ten years the Albemarle colony prospered under the wise and prudent management of the officers, whom the people had put in charge of affairs without leave or license from lord or king. But finally Culpeper and Durant decided of their own accord to give up their authority and restore the management of affairs to the Proprietors. An amicable settlement was arranged with these owners of Albemarle, who, realizing the wrongs the settlers had suffered at the hands of Miller and his associates, made no attempt to punish the leaders of the rebellion. John Harvey was quietly installed as temporary governor until Seth Sothel, one of the Proprietors, should come to take up the reins of government himself.
So at Enfield Farm, now the property of one of Pasquotank's most successful farmers and business men, Mr. Jeptha Winslow, began a disturbance which culminated a hundred years later in the Revolutionary War; and here, in embryo form, in 1677, was the beginning of our republic—"a government of the people, for the people, by the people."
CHAPTER IV
THE HECKLEFIELD FARM
Of the old Hecklefield house on Little River in Perquimans County, mentioned so often in the Colonial Records as the place of meeting for the Governor's Council, the General Court, and on one notable occasion, as the legislative hall of the Grand Assembly of Albemarle, not one stick or stone is left standing to-day. Only a few bricks where the great chimney once stood now remain, to suggest to the imagination the hospitable hearth around whose blazing logs the Governor and his colleagues, the Chief Justice and his associates, and the Speaker of the Assembly and his fellow representatives used to gather, when the old home was the scene of the public meetings of the Albemarle Colony.
The Hecklefield home was located on Durant's Neck on the plantation adjoining the tract of land purchased by George Durant from Kilcokonen, the great chief of the Yeopims. Though no one now living remembers the ancient building, yet the residents of Durant's Neck to-day, many of whom are the descendants of the early settlers in that region, confidently point out the site of Captain Hecklefield's house, and with one accord agree to its location, "about three hundred yards to the north of the main Durant's Neck road, at the foot of the late Calvin Humphries' Lane."
An old sycamore tree, whose great girth gives evidence of the centuries it has seen, stands by the side of the road at the entrance to the lane. Its mottled trunk and wide spreading branches are one of the landmarks of the region. And beneath its sheltering boughs, Durant and Catchmaid, Pricklove and Governor Drummond himself, who, tradition claims, was one of the residents of Durant's Neck, may often have met to talk over the affairs of the infant settlement. Governor Hyde and Chief Justice Gale have doubtless often hailed with relief the glistening white branches and broad green leaves of the old tree, whose outlines had grown familiar through many a journey to Hecklefield's home on business of state.
No description of the house is now extant. But that the building must have been, for those days, large and commodious, is evident from the fact that so often beneath its roof the leading men of the colony gathered to transact affairs of public interest. On no less than twenty occasions did executive, judicial and legislative officers assemble at Captain Hecklefield's to perform their various duties. That a private home was chosen as the scene of these gatherings arose from the fact that for over forty years after the first recorded settlement in North Carolina, no town had been founded within her borders. Therefore no public building of any kind, court-house or capitol, had been erected, and the Council, the Assembly and the Court were held at the homes of those planters, whose houses were large enough to accommodate such assemblies.
Local tradition tells us that the first court ever held in our State was convened under a great beech still standing on Flatty Creek, an arm of the broad Pasquotank, in Pasquotank County. But no records of this court can be found, nor does tradition tell whether the judge and advocates, plaintiffs and defendants, witnesses and jury assembled beneath the branches of that ancient tree, still strong and sturdy, came in answer to the call for the Palatine Court, the General Court, or the more frequently assembled Precinct Court.