On June 19th, we mark the day in 1865 when Union General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and announced that the enslaved people of that state were free — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation had declared it so. Word of freedom had traveled slowly, but when it arrived, it changed everything. In 2021 this day became a federal holiday.
In Edenton, Juneteenth carries particular weight. This is a town where the road to freedom didn’t begin with a proclamation read aloud in a distant city — it began here, on these streets and at this harbor, in the courage of people who refused to wait for permission to be free. To honor Juneteenth in Edenton is to walk the very ground where that story unfolded.
A Town at the Center of the Story
Long before the Civil War, Edenton’s waterfront was the town’s industrial heart. That same maritime world was something else, too: a path to freedom. African American watermen helped arrange passage for freedom-seekers aboard ships bound north. Historians know it today as the Maritime Underground Railroad, and Edenton’s role in it is recognized by the National Park Service as part of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. You can stand where it happened, at Colonial Waterfront Park, and see it for yourself.
Harriet Jacobs and the House on the Hill
No story binds Edenton to the meaning of Juneteenth more closely than that of Harriet Jacobs. Born into slavery in Edenton around 1813, Jacobs endured years of abuse and, rather than surrender her children or her freedom, hid for nearly seven years in a cramped crawlspace, a space barely big enough to sit up in, before finally escaping north by ship. She later wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861, widely regarded as one of the most important first-person accounts of slavery ever written.
You can read a detailed account of her story and the surprising recovery of her autobiographical account, here.
Part 1-A prison of a different sort.
Part 2: L. Maria Child and the rediscovery of Harriet Jacobs.
Part 3: An astonishing freedom
Come and Remember
Juneteenth is a day for reflection and for celebration, for honoring how far the road to freedom stretched and how much courage it took to walk it. Edenton offers a rare chance to do both in one place. You can learn the history with your own feet on the ground, and then stand at the water and celebrate what that history made possible.
This June, come honor the day where so much of the story began. Walk the streets Harriet Jacobs walked, stand at the harbor that carried people to freedom!
