A Short History of Sunbury

Sunbury is a community in east-central Gates County, 39 feet above sea level, that grew up where roads crossed¹. It has never been incorporated. The Census Bureau draws a statistical boundary around it, 2.45 square miles of land that held 276 people in 2020², but there is no town hall, and its history has to be pieced together from travelers, mills, postmasters and schools.

1758–1786 Granby's on the Post Road

A road ran south from Suffolk, Virginia, through Corapeake and the ground where Sunbury now stands well before the county existed³. When North Carolina's first post route opened in 1758, running from Suffolk to Edenton and on to Wilmington, the 1916 county historian Isaac S. Harrell thought it probably took a more westerly path through Somerton and Sarum, though he granted that the road through Corapeake and Sunbury was shorter and that travelers' accounts show it in use⁴.

One of those travelers was Elkanah Watson, whose memoirs of his journeys were published in 1856. Riding from Suffolk toward Edenton in the autumn of 1777, he described a wide, level road through pine forest along the northern edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, which he said was then a hiding place for Loyalists and for people who had escaped slavery. He crossed into North Carolina late in the day and spent the night with a Mr. Granby, "a wealthy planter and merchant," who told him about Lake Drummond in the middle of the swamp and about a plan Washington and others had once considered to drain it with a canal⁵.

Watson came back in the spring of 1786. With no other transport out of Suffolk he rode in a returning coal cart behind one tired horse, two hours in heavy rain and darkness, to the house of "Mr. Granby, a wealthy planter of Gates County." He found a dance under way and a host who did not remember him and was slow to take in a muddy stranger, though with no tavern for miles Granby relented. When Watson passed that way again the following summer, in a cocked hat and a blue coat with a velvet cape with his attendant, Mills, riding beside him, Granby received him, in Watson's words, as he might have received a general⁶. Harrell, retelling the story in 1916, put the second visit five years after the first; the memoir's own dates make it nine⁷.

Harrell adds that Granby was among the richest men in the county and lived about where Sunbury is now, that the settlement around him was at first called Granby, and that it later became Sunsbury and then Sunbury. In his day a bridge near the village still carried the Granby name⁷. A 1978 state park plan repeats that Granby lived on the present site of Sunbury³.

1720–1801 Costen's Mill & Hunters Millpond

William S. Powell's North Carolina Gazetteer tells Sunbury's origin a different way. It says the community began at a nearby mill, Costens Mill, which John Collet's 1770 map of North Carolina labels Constants Mill, and that the mill's owner moved to the present site of Sunbury when the road was rerouted¹⁸. Harrell's Granby story and Powell's mill story are not necessarily in conflict. Both describe a place that formed around whoever kept the store, the mill or the big house on the road, and both have the settlement following the road.

The name stuck to the neighborhood. On March 11, 1799, the Methodist bishop Francis Asbury wrote in his journal that he rode from Gates Court House to "Constants chapel, on one of the branches of Bennett's creek," stayed at Isaac Hunter's, and held an evening meeting with Black worshippers⁹. Harrell, citing the journal, places another visit to Constant's in 1801¹⁰. Members of the Costen family later served as Sunbury's postmasters and as trustees of its academy¹¹¹².

A second, older mill stood just south of Granby's. The 1978 master plan for Merchants Millpond State Park describes Hunters Millpond, built before 1720 where Raynor Swamp and Harrell Swamp join at the head of Bennetts Creek, and says its dam was destroyed in 1922 when Highway 32 was built³. The park's 2017 management plan dates the pond more loosely to the early 1700s and agrees that road building ended it in 1922¹³. Farther down the same creek, a later dam made Merchants Millpond, whose story has its own page.

1816–1832 Sunbury, Folly, Sunsbury

The village had a post office by 1816. The North Carolina Postal History Society's catalog for Gates County lists George Gilbert Gray as Sunbury's first postmaster, appointed February 12, 1816. For a few months the office went by another name: the catalog records it as Folly from December 13, 1827, with Richard Ballard as postmaster, until the Sunbury name returned on March 10, 1828. Later postmasters included Henry Costen in 1830 and William E. Costen in 1839, and the catalog files the office under two spellings, Sunbury and Sunsbury¹¹. Harrell also mentions a township known early on as Folley, later Holly Grove, which may explain the borrowed name¹⁴.

1830–1860 Academies and Churches

In 1832 the General Assembly passed an act "to incorporate the Sunsbury Academy in the County of Gates," naming fourteen trustees, among them Henry, James and George Costin, Willis Riddick and Isaac R. Hunter. Harrell writes that the academy at first took both boys and girls, that the arrangement lasted only about seven years, and that it was followed by a private boarding school for girls in the yard of the George Costen place, with three teachers and a music teacher, two pianos and lessons in French, while boys studied about a mile and a half away at the Gorden home under a Yale graduate named Kellogg¹². The 2009 National Register nomination for Sunbury High School adds a female seminary founded at Sunbury in 1852 by James Coston and lists a Riddicksville Academy near Sunbury from 1842¹⁵.

Churches grew up alongside the schools. Harrell traced the Methodist congregation at Sunbury, called Philadelphia, to a colonial-era chapel, and found trustees appointed for a church there after 1815, though no deed or building date¹⁶. He also recorded the local account of how Damascus, the only Christian Church congregation in the county before the Civil War, began around 1830: two brothers who belonged to Philadelphia quarreled over a ladder, and families split between the old church and the new one. Harrell flagged that story as tradition¹⁷.

1880s–1940 The Narrow-Gauge Years

Sunbury's next connection was a railroad. The Suffolk and Carolina Railway, a narrow-gauge line built south from Suffolk between the mid-1880s and 1902, carried crops and timber out of northeastern North Carolina. In the North Carolina Corporation Commission's railroad returns for 1904, as transcribed by a state railroad history site, Sunbury is the second North Carolina station on the line after Corapeake, followed by Bosley, Trotville and Hobbsville on the way to Edenton¹⁸.

The line did not last as long as the county's railroad era. A Virginia railroad history site reports that the Suffolk and Carolina was folded into the original Norfolk Southern Railroad in 1906 and that the Edenton–Suffolk track was abandoned in 1940¹⁹. The county government says rail service through Gates County ended in 1979²⁰, which points to a different line elsewhere in the county; the county's page does not name that line.

1906–1997 Sunbury High School

The building most people now connect with Sunbury is its school, and the 2009 National Register nomination tells its story in some detail. The county bought land for a public school at Sunbury in 1906 and built a one-story frame schoolhouse in 1908. A two-story brick Neoclassical school followed around 1924. By 1936 the state's director of schoolhouse planning, W. F. Credle, had inspected it with an architect and a contractor, called its parapet a menace, warned that the arch over the auditorium stage could fall, and recommended that it be abandoned. Voters approved up to $45,000 in bonds in 1937, and the new school was in use by 1938²¹.

The campus filled out over the next two decades: a teacherage in 1940, where teachers, usually single women, could rent rooms cheaply; a gymnasium in the winter of 1950–51; and a home economics and agriculture wing in 1960. A frame agriculture building from 1908 was moved about 200 feet in 1937 and kept in use. The school added a twelfth grade in the early 1940s, graduated its last high school class in 1962 when Gates County High School opened, and served as an elementary school until it closed in 1997. When the nomination was written it stood vacant, still owned by the county, and had been damaged by Hurricane Isabel in 2003²¹. It was listed on the National Register on May 12, 2009²². Its current use is not recorded in the sources above; the county can say how the building is used today.

Gates County's schools were segregated through these decades. The 2011 nomination for Reid's Grove School in Gatesville records that Black students from the Gatesville area went on after the eighth grade to a separate school in Sunbury, the T. S. Cooper Training School, until it burned in the 1940s, and that the county's schools were not integrated until well into the 1960s²³. The Gatesville page has more on that school system.

Present Sunbury Today

Sunbury is still organized around its crossroads, where NC 32 meets Highway 158, with houses and businesses mixed along both roads²⁴. Merchants Millpond State Park lies about five miles to the west along Highway 158, between Sunbury and Eason's Crossroads³. The 2024 postal catalog shows the office that opened in 1816 still in service, converted to a part-time post office managed remotely from South Mills¹¹.

For a buyer, that makes Sunbury simpler than Gatesville in one respect: there is no town line to check. The commuter cost chapter covers the county tax rate and the flat fees that ride on the tax bill, and the building chapter covers county zoning and permits. Unincorporated Gates County is mapped by FEMA as a single flood-insurance community with a current effective map dated December 21, 2018²⁶; check any parcel on the state's flood map viewer, and read the wells and septic chapter before you assume a lot near the swamps will take a septic system. A Sunbury mailing address can also reach well beyond the census boundary, so confirm the parcel's location rather than the envelope.