For a calendar of special events, call the Edenton visitors’ center (252-482-2637) or check its Web site, www.edenton.com . Edenton holds a candlelit tour of private houses each December and a Pilgrimage every other April. (The next Pilgrimage is scheduled for April 22 and 23, 2005.) The Cupola House, the Barker House, and the James lredell House, built about 1773 by a man later appointed to the first U.S. Supreme Court, are open every day to those who sign up for a tour at the visitors’ center.

Groups can arrange for guided tours highlighting Edenton’s African-American history; individuals can pick up a pamphlet with a map and description of important places. An escaped slave named Harriet Ann Jacobs wrote a memoir of her youth in Edenton, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl . The houses Jacobs lived in are gone, but a self-guided-tour brochure points out a number of sites, including the attic where she hid from her white master for nearly seven years.

Twenty miles south of Edenton is Somerset Place, a beautifully preserved antebellum rice plantation overlooking a lake. Surrounded by white fences, the main house and a cluster of outbuildings are painted in shades of buff and gold; several slave cabins have been restored and the foundations of a slave church and hospital excavated. Dorothy Redford, the site’s executive director and a descendant of Somerset slaves, recently brought together 2,000 plantation descendants for a reunion. For more about Somerset Place, call 252-797-4560 or visit its Web site: www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/sections/hs/somerset/somerset.htm .