A Short History of Camden County

Camden County is a long, narrow strip of land between two rivers, with a swamp at the top of it and a sound at the bottom. Almost everything that has ever happened here follows from that shape.

to 1777 Before the County

The land that became Camden County was the northeastern end of Pasquotank, and before the county line existed there was already a settled agricultural community here. Two of the oldest surviving pieces of it are still standing.

Shiloh Baptist Church, founded in 1729, is identified by NCpedia as North Carolina's oldest Baptist church.¹ And Milford, built 1744–46 on what is now SR 1205 south of NC 343, is recorded as North Carolina's oldest remaining two-story brick house.¹ It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.²

Both predate the county. A house older than the jurisdiction it sits in is a fair emblem for this place: the government arrived late and lightly, and it has stayed that way.

North Carolina's oldest surviving two-story brick house was more than thirty years old before the county it stands in was created.

1777 Cut From Pasquotank

Camden County was created in 1777 from the northeastern part of Pasquotank County, and named for Sir Charles Pratt, Earl of Camden, "in gratitude for the support he gave to the colonists."¹ Pratt was a British jurist and politician who had argued against Parliament's authority to tax the colonies without representation, and American place names honoring him are scattered across the eastern seaboard.

The county covers about 240 square miles of land.³ Farmland accounts for roughly a third of its total acreage, and it still does: corn, potatoes, wheat, soybeans and swine remain principal products.¹

1793–1805 Digging the Canal

The defining piece of infrastructure in this county's history is a ditch.

Both Virginia and North Carolina had approved a canal through the Great Dismal Swamp by 1790, and digging began in 1793. Crews worked from both ends toward the middle, and the two channels were finally connected in 1805.⁴ The finished waterway runs 22 miles from Deep Creek, Virginia to South Mills, North Carolina, about 50 feet wide and up to nine feet deep, and it was built entirely by hand with seven locks.⁵

Completion did not mean usefulness. For its first decade the canal was, in NCpedia's phrase, "little more than a muddy ditch," and the first real ship to make the passage — carrying bacon and brandy from the Roanoke River to Norfolk — did not go through until June 1814.⁴

The swamp it cut through has its own history, and it is not a gentle one. The Great Dismal Swamp sheltered communities of enslaved and free Black people, Indigenous people and their families who took refuge in ground that no one else could easily follow them into.⁴ The canal's construction and the swamp's role as a refuge belong to the same decades and the same landscape.

"The Dismal Swamp Canal is the oldest surviving artificial waterway in continuous use in the United States." — American Society of Civil Engineers

The canal was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1988 and is a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.⁵ It still carries boats, as an alternate route on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

1740–1840 Three Names for One Place

The county seat has been renamed twice. It was established as Plank Bridge in 1740, became Jonesborough in 1792, and had settled into Camden by 1840.¹ The county's own government describes its seat as "the Courthouse Township of Camden."⁶

You will still hear "Camden Courthouse" locally. That is a colloquialism carried forward from a period when the courthouse was the only thing at the crossroads worth naming, not the seat's official name. If an older name turns up in a deed chain or a nineteenth-century survey, it is not a different place.

The Camden County Courthouse on NC 343 was listed on the National Register in 1972, and the Camden County Jail beside it in 1984.²

1862 The Battle of South Mills

In April 1862 the canal became a military objective. Union forces under Brigadier General Jesse L. Reno — roughly 3,000 men — moved on South Mills with orders to destroy the locks of the Dismal Swamp Canal, so that Confederate ironclads being built in Virginia could not reach the Albemarle Sound and threaten the Union position there.⁷

Confederate Colonel Ambrose R. Wright met them with about 900 men. Outnumbered better than three to one, Wright's force dug a ditch across the road, filled it with wood torn from fences and buildings, and set it alight — "the roasted ditch" — and held the Union advance for four hours until their ammunition ran out.⁷

The Federals held the field. They also went home. Reno withdrew that night on false reports of large Confederate reinforcements massing at Norfolk, and the locks were never destroyed. Union losses were 13 killed, 101 wounded and 13 missing; Confederate losses were 6 killed, 19 wounded and 3 captured.⁷ Both sides claimed it: the Union for holding the ground, the Confederacy for saving the canal.⁸

The war was hard on the waterway regardless. The canal could not service its debt through the 1870s and needed a major reconstruction between 1896 and 1899 before it worked properly again.⁴

2006 One Government

The most consequential thing to happen in Camden County in living memory is administrative.

In June 2006 the county achieved status as a consolidated city-county, and on July 1, 2006 it became a Unified Government — a single entity holding both county powers and the municipal powers a city would ordinarily hold. The county's own history page states it plainly: "Camden County is the first and only consolidated city-county in the State of North Carolina."⁶ Elsewhere the county writes simply that "Camden is the only consolidated city-county government in North Carolina."⁹

North Carolina's enabling framework for this sits in Chapter 160B of the General Statutes, the Consolidated City-County Act.¹⁰ The usual shape of a consolidation elsewhere is a city dissolving into a county. Camden reached the same destination from the other direction, having never had a city to dissolve.

Present The County Today

The Census Bureau estimated Camden County's population at 11,315 as of July 1, 2025, against 10,355 at the 2020 census and 9,980 in 2010 — roughly 13 percent growth across fifteen years, at a density of 43.1 people per square mile.³

The county carries nine current National Register listings, most of them individual eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses plus the courthouse, the jail and the canal itself.² There is no historic district, no preservation commission and no design review anywhere in the county, because there is no municipality to have created one.

What the county has instead is the corridor: the Dismal Swamp Canal beside US-17, Dismal Swamp State Park on one bank, and the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge behind it — near 113,000 acres, and the largest intact remnant of a swamp that once covered more than a million.¹¹

Two hundred and twenty years after the ditch was connected, the same waterway is why a good share of the people looking at property here are looking at property here.