1671- Journals of the Grand Council/Senate of the Province/Colony/State of North Carolina, with various titles and private and state printers. Many
of the early journals are available only in manuscript format or in edited reprints. The earliest extant journal appears to be that for the Grand
Council covering August 25, 1671 to June 24, 1680. North Carolina bears the distinction of having hosted the first English colony in America, the famous
“Lost Colony” of Roanoke. This was established in 1585, and then, after quick abandonment, reestablished in 1587. Neither establishment “took.” For the
next eight decades the mostly uninhabited area now comprising North Carolina, was nominally part of and administered by the Colony of Virginia. In
1663 Charles I of England granted a Charter for the Province of Carolina, named after the Latin Carolus for himself, to a group of eight “Lords
Proprietors.” This group of nobles had helped restore him to the throne in 1660. Initially the Carolina territory nominally comprised an area now occupied
by the modern American states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina. In 1665 the Carolina Charter was further expanded
to nominally include Spanish territory to the south as far as St. Augustine in modern Florida. However the first settlement in the whole vast area,
Charles Town {now Charleston, S.C.} was not founded until 1670, and for many decades most of the area was sparsely populated. The Lords Proprietors
administered the small population for roughly five decades through a body called the Grand Council. In acknowledgment of the difficulty of governing the
vast territory, starting in 1691 the Colonial proprietors appointed a governor resident in Charleston for the whole of Carolina, but regularly appointed
either another governor or a deputy to administer the northern portion of the colony which was taking on settlers from Virginia. During this period
Bath, the oldest town in the colony served as a nominal capital from 1702-1722, after which, until 1743, Edenton took on that role. Historical records
for the period are very incomplete. For example, there are fewer than six sets of recorded Minutes of the Executive Council prior to 1711. Therefore,
it is often unclear which Carolina executive and legislative acts during the years 1691-1729 applied to which parts of the sprawling colony. In 1712,
North and South Carolina were officially divided into separate colonies, with South Carolina continuing to nominally administer the dependencies
further south. In 1719, in response to the settlers’ dissatisfaction with proprietary rule, Carolina was effectively made into a crown colony administered
by a royal governor and his council. This was made official in 1729 when the Lords Proprietors sold their charter back to the Crown. In that same
year, by act of Parliament, the territories roughly comprising modern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi were severed off and given a separate Royal
Charter as the Colony of Georgia, and both North and South Carolina, now crown colonies, assumed their modern borders. In that year South Carolina received
a royal governor and council. However, the new colony of North Carolina, with a population of 30,000 in 1730, had no permanent institutions of
government until their establishment at New Bern in 1743. North Carolina became independent from England by means of the Halifax Resolves issued by its
Fourth Provincial Congress in Halifax on 12 April 1776. The colony was a Patriot base during the American Revolution, and officially became the 12th state
of the Union on 21 November 1789. After statehood, in 1794, the capital was moved to Raleigh. Pimsleur’s Checklists of Basic American Legal
Publications, in its listings of identified published session laws for North Carolina, begins with an unenumerated session in the year 1752. However, various
legislative assemblies with law-making power over the area comprising modern North Carolina were functioning at least as far back as 1671; i.e., The
Grand Council for Carolina, 1670-1719, and His Majesty’s Council for Carolina, 1720-1775. The history of the Senate of Carolina dates back to the
beginning of local rule by the Proprietors through the Grand Council in 1671. The House of Representatives dates back to the establishment in 1691 of an
advisory body to the Grand Council consisting of 20 elected members termed the Commons House of Assembly. (Digitized from a microfilm copy of titles
originally held by the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, the North Carolina Secretary of State, the Library of Congress, as well as
other sources).
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