Close your eyes and imagine folding time so that the present and the deep past overlap. Around 3 million years ago, whales swam in moonlit seas over what are now the cotton fields and farmlands of Edgecombe County, North Carolina, 100 miles inland from today’s Atlantic Ocean.
During the Pliocene Epoch, a warmer world existed where sea levels were significantly higher, submerging what is now eastern North Carolina beneath the ocean.
These whales swam over the Victorian mansions and plantation homes in the county seat of Tarboro, the old white clapboard church in Princeville, and the sacred site of Freedom Hill, where formerly enslaved Africans established a town at the edge of the Tar River.
