General John Willis, owner of Red Banks plantation, lobbied the new state of North Carolina to put Robeson County's seat of government on his land. The site he offered had a ford across the Lumber River and a crossroads of frontier paths. On August 14, 1787, 170 acres were surveyed and lots distributed by lottery under the county court's supervision. The first courthouse was a wooden farmhouse Willis sold to the county and had moved into place. The North Carolina General Assembly formally chartered the town on November 3, 1788. From the river bank, brick warehouses and a hotel rose first. Goods came upriver from Georgetown, South Carolina. Logs went down the river — bound for the Navy's shipyards, floated in great rafts by men who knew every snag and shoal in the dark water.

The river that gave the city its name runs blackwater — water stained the color of strong tea by tannins from cypress and gum trees in the swamps it drains. It is slow. It is shallow. Lumber River State Park preserves 115 miles of it as a designated Natural and Scenic River, one of the few in the South to receive that protection. Paddle the river through Robeson County and you pass bald cypresses draped in Spanish moss, oxbow lakes left behind when the channel shifted, and stretches of bank where the Lumbee people fished and traveled for centuries before the arrival of Europeans. The river is also why Lumberton floods. The cypress swamps are floodplain. When a hurricane parks over the watershed for days, the river has nowhere to put the water but city blocks.

Cultural ephemera that pass through Lumberton make a strange list. David Lynch set his 1986 film Blue Velvet here, though he filmed in Wilmington — the name 'Lumberton' was chosen for its evocative ordinariness, the kind of small American town where evil could hide unnoticed. From 1947 to 1950 Lumberton fielded a Chicago Cubs minor-league affiliate in the Tobacco State League: the Lumberton Cubs, later renamed the Lumberton Auctioneers. The National Civic League named Lumberton an All-America City in 1970 and again in 1995 — the second award came shortly after the city's image had been bruised nationally by the 1988 Robesonian hostage crisis and the 1993 murder of James R. Jordan Sr., father of Michael Jordan, at a roadside stop near I-95 south of town. The city's relationship with its national reputation has been uneasy for decades.

Lumberton lies in what is called the Carolina Border Belt — a tobacco-growing region that straddles the North-South Carolina line, defined more by warehouse networks and auction markets than by any geographic feature. Tobacco shaped the city's twentieth-century economy until the federal buyout program ended large-scale Carolina tobacco growing in 2004. Textile mills shaped it until NAFTA shaped them out of business. What is left is a downtown of brick buildings, several of them listed on the National Register of Historic Places — the Carolina Theatre, the Planters Building, the Robeson County Agricultural Building, the Alfred Rowland House. Some are restored. Some are not. A Border Belt newsroom called the BorderBelt Independent now covers the region's rural and economic stories with a depth most regional papers no longer have.

Of the 19,025 people the 2020 census counted in Lumberton, 39 percent were white, 37 percent were Black, 13 percent were Native American (primarily Lumbee), and seven percent were Hispanic. Lumberton has produced a remarkable list of people: civil-rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who has represented the families of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor; Afeni Shakur, Black Panther Party member and mother of Tupac Shakur; Angus Wilton McLean, the 56th Governor of North Carolina; gymnast Ashton Locklear, a Lumbee Olympian; multiple NFL players; the actor Penny Fuller; the wrestling 'Tatanka' Chris Chavis. The reputation Lumberton earns from the outside — for the hurricanes, the poverty, the news stories — is one thing. The reputation it earns from the people who leave and come back is another. They tend to come back.