Nuts and boats: not much has changed over recent decades in Edenton, one of North Carolina's most historic and charming hamlets.

• Author: Moriarty, Jim
• Position: Town Square

Edenton may be the little town that time remembered. Tucked off Albemarle Sound near the mouth of the Chowan River, due west from Kitty Hawk, the remoteness that made this waterfront town an attractive settlement in the 18th century has made it just as easy to bypass ever since. The colonial capital of North Carolina from 1722 to 1743, Edenton was a protected, bustling port until a hurricane closed Roanoke Inlet in 1795. The Dismal Swamp Canal took trade to the north, and the railroads didn't come its way. Buildings of its heyday could have become fossils, but the town chose to retain some of its heritage. Its population, now about 5,000, has barely budged over the last 45 years, with more retirees and fewer textile-mill workers.

"Edenton is still undiscovered. It's unspoiled. People have rallied together over decades to preserve what's here," says Samuel Bobbitt "Sambo" Dixon, a lawyer who practices in the same office of his grandfather, Richard Dillard Dixon, one of the judges at the Nuremberg trials. "It's the most historic place in North Carolina." The N.C. State Supreme Court still meets for rare, essentially ceremonial occasions at the Chowan County Courthouse, built in 1767. Dixon lives and keeps his law office in Beverly Hall, a house owned by his family for 200 years. When the town's 1900-vintage mill's last owner, Greensboro-based Unifi Inc., closed the plant in 1995 and donated it to Preservation North Carolina, it was then redeveloped into condominiums, while 50 small houses where mill workers once lived also were refurbished. "We were able to preserve the whole thing," says Dixon, who is a director of the National Trust Council, a philanthropic arm of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. "If anything, Edenton has retained its character."

Roland Vaughan, 72, has been mayor of Edenton for 20 years. He recently sold his jewelry store and now runs the town from the inside pocket of his coat. Most mornings he can be found at the Edenton Coffee Shop, the town's "font of all knowledge," he says. "The biggest thing we've done is to save the businesses that are here, for the most part, and help them with expansion."

Agriculture is still the largest industry. During the fall harvest season, the smell of roasting peanuts from Jimbo's Jumbos hangs like an aromatic fog over the...