Smithfield was founded in 1777, ten months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but its origins reach back to the 1750s with the arrival of John Smith, one of the area’s earliest settlers. In 1759 he petitioned to operate a ferry where the Neuse River crossed his land, and the place became known as Smith’s Ferry. In 1762 his son, John Smith Jr., bought 228 acres of his father’s tract, including the ferry, and in 1771 he and his wife settled there and built a home overlooking the river that also served as a public house for travelers. That same year construction began on Johnston County’s third courthouse nearby, and the name Johnston County Courthouse soon replaced Smith’s Ferry. Smithfield came into being with the inaugural session of the General Assembly of the newly proclaimed State of North Carolina in 1777, after Smith Jr. agreed to provide 100 acres for the town and 50 more acres for a common along the Neuse River south and west of his home. A bridge later replaced the ferry, was burned during the Civil War to hinder the Northern army’s march through the county, and was rebuilt afterward by J. Bryant Alford, a free black during slavery and Johnston County’s first African-American merchant, who also opened a saw mill, cotton gin, and store there; the bridge remained in use until the early 1900s. Although the 1777 charter reserved the riverfront as a commons, it was not used as a park until nearly 200 years later, when the Neuse Riverwalk was first conceived as the Neuse River Nature Trail, opened in 1972, improved in 1977, further upgraded after a 1999 capital campaign, and incorporated into the Buffalo Creek Greenway upon its completion in November 2009 as part of North Carolina’s Mountains-to-Sea Trail.