Peninsula In Passage

Bennett’s Welcome Best-selling North Carolina author, Inglis Fletcher, set her popular 1950 historical novel “Bennett’s Welcome” in the Bennett’s Creek/Jamestown area. Fletcher, born in 1879 in Illinois, traveled widely before finally settling in 1940 at Bandon Plantation, outside of Edenton, North Carolina. The 1804 plantation wasn’t far from the Tyrrell County, home place of her great grandfather. A prolific and demanding writer Fletcher wrote more than a dozen novels about life from 1585 to the late 1700s in North Carolina and bordering Virginia. She insisted on historical accuracy and her typical work pattern was to spend two years on each novel, one year for research and another year for writing. Fletcher, who was named to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame, wrote into her books the recurring themes of ownership and love of the land as basic to man’s freedom. Some reviewers have said that she hoped the history she captured would illuminate the challenges of current society. “Bennett’s Welcome” is the engrossing story of an exiled Royalist who finds a new life in the Bennett’s Creek area in the early 1600s, first as a servant eventually indentured to Richard Bennett and then as a landowner. Fletcher died in 1969 but her inclusion of Bennett and numerous local sites continues to bring the action of “Bennett’s Welcome” home.

Inglis Fletcher

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