Bath, the oldest town in North Carolina, was established in 1705 by French Huguenots from Virginia and early English inhabitants including John Lawson, author of the first history of Carolina, Christopher Gale, Chief Justice of the colony, and Thomas Cary, governor from 1708 to 1711. By 1708 it had 12 houses and 50 people, and its chief trade was in naval stores, furs, and tobacco, while a grist mill was established in 1707 and a library given to St. Thomas Parish in 1701 became the first public library in North Carolina. Bath's early years were troubled by political rivalries, fever epidemics, Indian wars, and piracy, including Cary's Rebellion in 1711, a conflict between former Governor Thomas Cary and Governor Edward Hyde over the role of the Quaker Party that ended when troops from Virginia arrived in July 1711, leaving Hyde in power and Cary sent to England for trial. That same summer a severe yellow fever epidemic killed many inhabitants, and the Tuscarora War of 1711 to 1715 soon followed; on September 22, 1711, Indians attacked plantations around Bath, many people fled into town, and troops under Colonel James Moore from South Carolina later took Fort Nooherooka on March 23, 1713, ending the threat of further attack in the Bath area. Bath was also associated with the pirate Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, who was a friend of Governor Charles Eden and Tobias Knight and was killed by Lieutenant Robert Maynard in the fall of 1718. After this turbulent period, Bath became a quieter center of settled life, with St. Thomas Church dating from 1734, visits by Reverend George Whitefield between 1739 and 1765, the Palmer-Marsh House erected about 1744, meetings of the General Assembly in 1744 and 1752, and consideration as the colonial capital in 1746. Governors Thomas Cary and Charles Eden lived there for a time, as did Edward Moseley, but in the late colonial period Bath lost much of its importance to Washington up the Pamlico River, and after the Beaufort County seat moved there in 1785 Bath lost much of its trade and importance and remained a small country town.