His search had been hampered by the unwillingness of potential candidates to leave their well-provided situations; Fulton, however, was at that time unemployed and agreed to take the post on a salary of £1200 per annum.
Fulton examined the coastal inlets, sounds and principal rivers with an eye toward practical improvements in navigation while Brazier conducted the surveys and made maps and plates thereof.
In 1821 Fulton designed the Roanoke Canal aqueduct over Chockoyotte Creek in Halifax County, a 110-foot-long (34 m) structure with a 30-foot (9.1 m) arch, which edifice still stands despite a century of neglect.
An even more impressive structure designed by Fulton over the Dan River at Milton in Caswell County, consisting of eight elliptical stone arches, has been lost.
Consideration was given to a system of canals which would connect the Yadkin and Catawba rivers to the Cape Fear, thereby giving westerners an outlet to the Atlantic.
In 1822 in his message to the legislature, Governor Holmes said that for several years we have had the services of an able engineer, who has explored our rivers, pointed out the obstructions to their navigation and given instructions as to how they were to be removed, a zealous and intelligent board, pushing the projects by all the means in their power, and still their progress has been so gradual as to be almost imperceptible.
Had our limited funds been originally directed to a few points of primary and general importance, and nor dispersed in small sums throughout the State, the result would have been more beneficial to every section .
For instance, if the channel of the Cape Fear between Wilmington and the bar could have been deepened, so as to allow passage of vessels without the aid of lighters it would have been better.
According to Powell, at that time, most North Carolinians considered engineering to be a lot of academic stuff, devoid of practical value.
The average farmer felt he could take a gang of laborers with spades, drag pans and wagons and dig a canal, or construct a road while the Engineers were figuring on it and drawing a lot of useless plans.
The State was having difficulty collecting on its land sales of the Cherokee tracts, the Bank of New Bern stock declined and further, few of the internal improvement projects paid on any regular basis.
In 1825, the House passed a resolution directing the Board to reduce Fulton's salary to $3,300 and to hire his services out to other states as occasion arose.
There, he discovered he had been engaged by a discredited board, a situation not unlike that in North Carolina, and by the end of the year Fulton found himself in private practice in Milledgeville, at that time the capital of Georgia.
Fulton and his family, while in Raleigh, being Anglicans, attended Christ Episcopal Church, and one of his daughters, Julia Jane was born there.
David L. Swain wrote that Mrs. Fulton "is worth $1000 per annum to Raleigh, & the society of the place would suffer an irreparable loss by her removal."
They were collected and published the next year in a pamphlet entitled The Numbers of Carlton which caught the public imagination and led to the construction of the first railroads in the state.
[3] A Chart and Section of the River Dart, from Totness (Devon, UK) to the Anchor Stone at Langham Wood Point was surveyed, under the direction of Messrs G & J Rennie, by Hamilton Fulton.