Qualla: Robeson County, North Carolina

Robeson County, North Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Katangais, CC BY-SA 3.0. Few rural counties in America look like Robeson County. The 2020 census found 37 percent of residents Lumbee Indian, 23 percent Black, 25 percent white, and ten percent Hispanic — proportions that exist almost nowhere else outside of small zones in the borderlands of the Southwest. This is a county where three communities — Lumbee, Black, white — have lived alongside one another for two and a half centuries without any single one becoming dominant in the way that has happened in most of the rural South. It is also a county that has been ravaged by hurricanes, deindustrialization, the opioid crisis, and four hundred years of complicated history with race and land. To understand Robeson is to accept that no easy summary of the South works here.

Image: Katangais | CC BY-SA 3.0

Robeson County, North Carolina: Three Peoples, One Land

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Department of Agriculture. Forest Service. 7/1/1905, Public domain. The Lumbee were here when the first Highland Scots and Buckskin whites arrived in the 1720s, drawn from earlier Native communities — Cheraw, Saponi, Tuscarora — that had been pushed together by colonial pressure. Wealthy white planters acquired the best land. Enslaved Africans we...

Image: Department of Agriculture. Forest Service. 7/1/1905 | Public domain

Robeson County, North Carolina: Henry Berry Lowry and the Lowry War

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. The Civil War and its aftermath turned Robeson into a battlefield in a way that no other county in the South quite was. The Confederate Home Guard conscripted Lumbee men for forced labor at Fort Fisher, where many died. Lumbees hiding in the swamps began helping Union prisoners e...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Robeson County, North Carolina: Hayes Pond, 1958

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Indy beetle, CC0. Twentieth-century Robeson County has its own moments. In January 1958, James 'Catfish' Cole, a Klan leader from South Carolina, advertised a rally near Maxton at Hayes Pond, explicitly to intimidate the Lumbee community after his Klan had burned crosses in St. Pauls and Lumberton...

Image: Indy beetle | CC0

Robeson County, North Carolina: Drug Trade, Corruption, and the Newspaper Takeover

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerry Dincher, CC BY-SA 2.0. Robeson's midway location on Interstate 95 between Miami and New York pulled it into the cocaine trade of the 1980s. The county became one of North Carolina's most violent — its homicide rate four times the national average by mid-decade. Political tensions ran high. On February ...

Image: Gerry Dincher | CC BY-SA 2.0

Robeson County, North Carolina: Hurricanes and Endurance

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Census, Ruhrfisch, Public domain. In 2016 Hurricane Matthew flooded Lumberton beyond record. In 2018 Hurricane Florence broke that record. Entire neighborhoods in west Lumberton were left abandoned. Robeson has the worst public health outcomes of any county in North Carolina, the highest opioid death rate in the ...

Image: US Census, Ruhrfisch | Public domain