Windsor, NC

Windsor has been the Bertie County seat since 1774, when the town was established at Gray’s Landing on the Cashie River. The Colonial Assembly chartered it in 1768, and the river made Windsor a port for agricultural and timber trade before highways took over the heavy lifting. The old town still occupies the same roughly 100-acre footprint, with King Street at the center of a historic district filled with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings. That is a lot of continuity for a town of 3,582 people in the 2020 census.

The Cashie is still the best way to understand Windsor. The river’s dark, slow-moving water is used for canoeing and kayaking, and the town and Roanoke-Cashie River Center help people get out on it. Gray’s Landing Park also carries the memory of a Civil War skirmish, when Union gunboats came up from Plymouth in January 1864 and met a small Confederate force. Windsor’s schools, courthouse, churches, and riverfront all sit close enough to make the town easy to read, even as U.S. 17 sends modern traffic past the old port. It is an Inner Banks place with a courthouse calendar and a river-town memory.