Qualla: Richmond County, North Carolina

Richmond County, North Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Indy beetle, CC0. John Coltrane was born here. Hamlet, North Carolina, September 23, 1926 — in a small wooden house that still stands. He left as a young man and never really came back, but the saxophonist who would change jazz forever spent his first years inside the orbit of the Seaboard Air Line Railroad, where his grandfather preached, where every freight whistle marked the hours, and where five rail lines crossed each other inside a single small town. Richmond County's character was set long before Coltrane arrived: peach orchards in the Sandhills, cotton mills on the Pee Dee River, turpentine in the longleaf pines, and a railroad that made Hamlet briefly one of the busiest junctions in the American South.

Image: Indy beetle | CC0

Richmond County, North Carolina: Named for a Friend Across the Ocean

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mauser1488, CC BY-SA 3.0. Richmond County was created in 1779, carved off Anson County and named for Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond and Lennox — a British politician who, despite being a duke, had argued in Parliament against the war with the American colonies. The county seat, established a few yea...

Image: Mauser1488 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Richmond County, North Carolina: The Town Five Railroads Made

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Boston Public Library, CC BY 2.0. Hamlet should not have grown. In the 1880s it was an unremarkable Sandhills village in a poor county. Then the Seaboard Air Line Railroad chose it as the crossing point for five separate rail lines — north-south to Florida, east-west across the Piedmont, branches off in every dir...

Image: Boston Public Library | CC BY 2.0

Richmond County, North Carolina: Sherman's Foragers, the Mills, and the Crash

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0. Federal troops under General Sherman entered Richmond County in March 1865 on their way north from the Carolinas Campaign. They burned the Richmond Manufacturing Company mill — the county's first textile plant, built in 1837 — and pushed on. The mill was rebuilt as the Great Fall...

Image: DiscoA340 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Richmond County, North Carolina: The Rock, the Refuge, the Saxophonist

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Three things in Richmond County draw outsiders. The first is Rockingham Speedway — The Rock — which opened in 1965 and hosted NASCAR Cup races until 2004, then sat empty for a decade before coming back in 2025. The second is the Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge, a quiet expanse o...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Richmond County, North Carolina: A Citizen Petition That Worked

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Musicinmybrain, Public domain. In November 1989, when Chem-Nuclear Systems announced a Richmond County site for a low-level nuclear waste disposal facility, a group of residents formed For Richmond County Environment — FORRCE — to fight it. They gathered 26,756 signatures opposing the site, more than sixty per...

Image: Musicinmybrain | Public domain