Location: Dobbs Street just off of Church St. in Hertford
County: Perquimans
Original Date Cast: 1986
John Skinner was born in Perquimans County in 1760 to Joshua and Sarah (Creecy) Skinner. Following service on the Continental Line, the young Skinner represented Perquimans in the state Senate in 1784, in the House of Commons in 1785, and again in the Senate in 1786 and 1787. He was consistently a champion of the Federalist cause and at Hillsborough in 1788 and Fayetteville in 1789 represented the county in conventions called to consider ratification of the United States Constitution.
In 1790 the U.S. Senate confirmed President Washington’s appointment of Skinner as the first federal marshal for the district of North Carolina. In addition to his primary responsibility of attending federal courts within the district, Skinner was charged with overseeing the taking of the first federal census in 1790. He left the office in 1794 and, in that year and again in 1797, was returned to the state House.
Skinner’s Perquimans seat, known as Ashland, was located in the Harvey’s Neck section of the county. One of the finest homes in northeastern North Carolina, it burned in 1952. Sometime after 1797, Skinner moved to his Montpelier estate in Chowan County, where he died in late 1819.
References:
William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, V, 356—sketch by Michael Hill
Frances Benjamin Johnston and Thomas Tileston Waterman, The Early Architecture of North Carolina: A Pictorial Survey (1941)
John L . Cheney Jr., comp., North Carolina Government, 1585-1979 (1979)
Dru Gatewood Haley and Raymond A. Winslow Jr., Historic Architecture of Perquimans County, North Carolina (1982)
Edenton Gazette, January 4, 1920