Sidebar shakes family tree, finds N.C.’s first female lawyer

Sidebar knows that many attorneys are history buffs, and we recently came across a tidbit that’s germane to not only our history, but practice of law in North Carolina as well.

It’s well-known in legal circles that Tabitha Anne Holton was the first woman in North Carolina to get a law license. Her attorney, Albion Winegar Tourgée, reminded Supreme Court justices that the state statute read that “all persons” were eligible to apply to get a lawyers license, and the Supreme Court granted her one.

Not as well known is that Ann Marwood Durant was the first woman who actually acted as an attorney in North Carolina. We know this because we were presented with the news from an uncle, who is very much into genealogy, that Durant is this Sidebar’s author’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother–that’s grandmother times nine–a fact that the Order of First Families of North Carolina recently confirmed.  

Durant was something else. She married George Durant in Virginia in 1659. Two years later, they moved to what’s now known as Durant’s Neck in Perquimans County, along the Albemarle Sound. While George was busy doing things like serving as attorney general and leading Culpeper’s Rebellion, Ann was busy with her own things, like raising nine children (so she has a lot of descendants out there) and holding court–literally.

In 1673, she represented Andrew Ball, a sailor who was suing his employer to recover unpaid wages, and won the case. Through the years, she sued people, on behalf of her husband and herself, who didn’t pay their bills at the Durants’ inn or other debts, and she defended other people from lawsuits. 

Her house served as a makeshift jail for prisoners awaiting trial. She also built caskets, arranged funerals, and sold “rum cider, quince drink, stockings, cloth and corn.”

She died in 1695, a year after her husband. Becky Stiles, who works at the Museum of Albemarle, described her as a woman who “fought for herself constantly.”

“She stood her own ground when the time called for it, because at the end of the day, the only person you can rely on is yourself.”