The Catawba's home is the Rock Hill area of South Carolina. The tribe gained federal recognition in 1993 through the Catawba Indian Tribe of South Carolina Land Claims Settlement Act, but the recognition came with a condition that would shape everything afterward: the Catawba agreed not to be governed by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Instead, they could operate only the games of chance permitted by the settlement and by South Carolina law, which at the time meant bingo and video poker. The bingo halls did not last. High sales taxes and the South Carolina Education Lottery hollowed out their margins. Then-Governor Nikki Haley refused to negotiate a casino compact. The tribe began looking across the border.

In September 2013, the Catawba announced what they had been calling, internally, Project Schoolhouse. The plan: a six hundred million dollar casino resort in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, thirty miles northwest of the Rock Hill reservation. They bought nearly seventeen acres overlooking I-85 and applied to the Department of the Interior to take it into federal trust. Then-Governor Pat McCrory and more than a hundred state representatives wrote the Bureau of Indian Affairs in opposition. The Eastern Band of Cherokee, whose Cherokee and Murphy casinos held the existing North Carolina gaming market, opposed it too. Local churches and community groups objected on religious and economic grounds. In 2018, after years of review, the Interior Department denied the trust application.

The Catawba refiled. They petitioned Congress. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham introduced Senate Bill 790 in 2019 to authorize the land transfer directly. North Carolina Senators Richard Burr and Thom Tillis supported it. In March 2020, the Interior Department reversed its earlier decision and placed the Kings Mountain land into trust. The Catawba had won. They had also, by then, partnered with Delaware North as a development consultant and SkyBoat Gaming as a project partner. The temporary casino opened July 1, 2021, with five hundred slot machines. By December it had grown to 954 slots and 46 electronic table games. Sports betting kiosks arrived in September 2022. By 2024, the floor had twelve live table games including craps, roulette, blackjack, and three-card poker.

In March 2022, the chief compliance officer of the National Indian Gaming Commission notified the Catawba that the SkyBoat contract violated federal law. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act forbids non-tribal corporations from holding management authority over tribal gaming, and the SkyBoat arrangement, as written, did exactly that. Construction on the permanent casino halted. A Wall Street Journal investigation that July reported that individuals with political connections, including Michael Haley, husband of Nikki Haley, and John Clyburn, brother of South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn, held ownership interests in companies connected to the project. The tribe and SkyBoat reached a settlement in 2024 to part ways. Permanent construction could finally resume.

The casino takes its name from two sources. The first is the eighteenth-century Catawba leader King Hagler, who died in 1763 after a long career of diplomatic survival between the Cherokee, the colonial governments, and the encroaching settlers. The second is the city of Kings Mountain itself, named for the nearby ridge where the Patriot victory of October 1780 helped turn the Revolutionary War in the South. The doubling matters. The Catawba have spent two and a half centuries asserting that they are still a sovereign nation, not a remnant. Two Kings Casino, sitting on land the tribe had to fight the United States to acquire, is the most concrete statement of that sovereignty they have ever made. The permanent facility is projected to cost seven hundred million dollars. The Catawba intend it to operate for generations.