rain the
Governor of North Carolina from collecting taxes in Currituck County;
and the question of the boundary line between Virginia and Carolina
still being uncertain, the sovereigns were asked to have the bounds
surveyed and settled.

Not for many years was this request regarded, though in 1711
commissioners from Virginia went to Currituck to meet those from
Carolina for the purpose of surveying the land and establishing the
boundary between the two colonies. For some reason the Carolina
commissioners failed to appear, and not till 1728 did the work of
settling the disputed boundaries really begin. In March of that year
commissioners from the two colonies met on the north shore of Currituck
Inlet, and a cedar post on the seashore was fixed as the beginning of
the line. The result of the survey was that many thousand acres and
several hundred people whom Virginia had claimed were found to be in the
Albemarle District.

This was naturally a great disappointment to Virginia, and equally a
matter of rejoicing to Carolina, not only on account of the extra
territory and inhabitants she now could lawfully claim, but because
Currituck Inlet, the only entrance from the sea north of Roanoke Island,
was thereafter indisputably thrown within her borders. This inlet, now
closed by the shifting sands that form the long sand bars on the
Carolina coast, was of great importance in the early days of the colony,
forming an entrance from the sea to the sound through which the trading
vessels could slip. So necessary was this inlet to the commerce of the
colony that in 1726 the General Assembly ordered that the powder money
accruing to the government by vessels coming into Currituck Inlet should
be appropriated for beaconing and staking out the channel at that
entrance. But by 1731, the steady beating of the waves on the coast had
deposited a bank of sand at the inlet. Governor Burrington wrote to the
Board of Trade that it was no longer possible for large vessels to enter
there, nor at Roanoke Inlet, which had also become so dangerous that no
one cared to use it, but that the vessels now were obliged to go around
by Ocracoke Inlet to make their exit and entrance from and into
Albemarle Sound. The closing of the inlet was such a serious misfortune
to the State that time and again efforts were made to reopen it, and the
Assembly of 1761 appropriated money for that purpose. But "man's
control stops with the sea"; the waves continued to d