[2][3][4][5] From 1530 until the mid-eighteenth century the Brazilian lands were donated to grantees, and these were shared with others in "sesmarias" (it was a plot of land distributed to a beneficiary, in the name of the king of Portugal, with the objective of cultivating originated as an administrative measure in the final periods of the Middle Ages in Portugal, the concession of sesmarias was widely used in the Brazilian colonial period).

On July 22, 1786, Colonel Antônio Barros Bezerra was granted the lands that enclose the municipality in agreement between the grantee and the King of Portugal.

After ten years, other families arrived, attracted by the fertility and space offered by the sesmeiros, who later formed the genealogical tree of the Pedro-avelinense people.

The families were: Câmara, Inácio da Costa, Batista, Leocádio, Bezerra, Xavier de Meneses, Pereira Pinto, Ferreira, Medeiros and Araújo.

In the same year the builder Manoel Cabral de Macedo built a public cemetery on the banks of the Gaspar Lopes River.

On 24-12-1921, Gaspar Lopes was renamed Epitácio Pessoa, in honor of the great Northeastern President whose motto was: To govern and open roads, and brought the railroad to the village.