They called it Freedom Hill. As the Civil War sputtered to its end in 1865, formerly enslaved African Americans gathered at a Union encampment south of Tarboro, North Carolina, along the Tar River. The freedmen chose the name in honor of a small rise of ground where a Union soldier had first read the Emancipation Proclamation aloud. The land belonged to two white planters, John Lloyd and Lafayette Dancy, who never tried to remove them -- partly because federal troops were nearby, partly because the low-lying ground flooded so regularly that no one else wanted it. On that unwanted floodplain, the residents of Freedom Hill built the first town in American history chartered and governed entirely by Black citizens.
Freedom Hill defied the assumptions white America held about freedmen's communities. Located in an agricultural region, it was not an agricultural settlement. The 1880 U.S. census recorded 379 inhabitants, of whom only 12 were farmers and 43 were farmhands. The rest worked in trades: day labor, laundering, seamstressing, carpentry, blacksmithing. This was unusual among freedmen's towns in the Southern United States, where most residents farmed. Freedom Hill's residents were artisans and tradespeople who served the broader Edgecombe County economy. During Reconstruction, planter Henry W. Shaw purchased inherited parcels near the settlement and began selling plots to the freedmen at low prices, though some residents continued to live as squatters. Black holdings grew near the Tar River bridge. A school was established in 1883. Churches rose. Residents were politically active: Robert S. Taylor served as an Edgecombe County justice of the peace, and William P. Mabson won a seat in the state legislature.
The push for incorporation came from both sides of the color line. Black residents wanted self-governance. White residents of Edgecombe County wanted Black workers available as a labor force but socially separated from their own communities. Both interests converged in February 1885, when the North Carolina General Assembly incorporated Freedom Hill as the town of Princeville, named for Turner Prince, a local carpenter. The incorporating act gave the town authority to elect its own government, with the first election scheduled for May 1886. It was a milestone without precedent: the first independently governed African American community chartered in the United States. In the years that followed, commercial development accelerated as residents established their own businesses. Most of the town's political leaders came from the mercantile class. From 1898 to 1909, Princeville operated its own federal post office staffed by Black postmasters -- a quiet assertion of civic competence in the teeth of the Jim Crow era.
The Tar River was Princeville's reason for being and its recurring curse. The low elevation that made the land available to freed people in the first place guaranteed that floods would return, again and again. In September 1999, Hurricane Floyd delivered the worst blow. The storm pulled coffins from the cemetery and pushed water to just below the height of rooftops and church steeples. FEMA offered to buy out every residence in town -- a proposal that would have erased Princeville from the map. Municipal officials refused. The decision was defiant and costly. Population declined. The tax base shrank. Edgecombe County assumed control of tax collection, policing, and water and sewer services. The State Treasurer's Office took over the town's finances in 1997 and again in 2012. But Princeville held on. In September 2021, the town adopted a comprehensive plan emphasizing resiliency, self-sufficiency, and economic growth -- the same goals its founders had pursued 156 years earlier on a muddy hillside above the Tar.
Princeville today is a town of about 1,254 people, sitting across the Tar River from Tarboro, with Rocky Mount a short drive to the west. Its historical significance draws visitors and scholars. In 1999, students from North Carolina State University created a mobile museum to showcase the town's heritage. The Abraham Wooten House, the Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church, and the Princeville School -- listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 -- stand as physical testimony to what the community built. The story of Princeville is not a tidy triumph. It is a story of endurance on contested ground, of a people who were given the land no one else wanted and made it mean something. The floodwaters have come and will come again. Each time, the question is the same one FEMA posed in 1999: will Princeville stay? Each time, the answer has been the same.
Located at 35.89°N, 77.53°W in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, on the south bank of the Tar River directly across from Tarboro. From 1,500-2,500 feet AGL, the town is visible as a small residential area nestled in the river's floodplain, with the Tar River bridge connecting it to Tarboro. The low-lying terrain and proximity to the river are immediately apparent from the air. Rocky Mount-Wilson Regional Airport (KRWI) is approximately 12 nm to the west. The Tar River provides an excellent visual navigation reference through the area.