Qualla: Sampson County, North Carolina

Sampson County, North Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US Census, Ruhrfisch, Public domain. Two million hogs. That is not a typo. Sampson County, which covers 947 square miles of southeastern North Carolina farmland, is home to roughly two million pigs - second in North Carolina only to neighboring Duplin County, and one of the highest concentrations of swine in the United States. The pigs do not register in the census numbers; the human population in 2020 was 59,036. They do register in just about everything else: the smell on a humid August evening downwind of a confinement barn, the lagoons of waste visible from the air, the tankers of feed and the trailers of finishing animals moving along Highway 421 toward processing plants. Sampson is also North Carolina's largest producer of turkeys, hay, and flue-cured tobacco. It is, in every sense, an agricultural county.

Image: US Census, Ruhrfisch | Public domain

Sampson County, North Carolina: Born in 1784, Named for John Sampson

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DiscoA340, CC BY-SA 4.0. The North Carolina General Assembly created Sampson County in April 1784, six months after the Treaty of Paris closed out the Revolutionary War. The new county was carved from Duplin to its east and would later annex land from Wayne and New Hanover. The man pushing for it was Col...

Image: DiscoA340 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sampson County, North Carolina: The Coharie

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NCDOTcommunications, CC BY 2.0. The Coharie are a state-recognized tribe whose ancestors lived in eastern North Carolina long before John Sampson or any European settler arrived. The 2000 census recorded 1,029 enrolled members of the Coharie Intra-tribal Council, headquartered in Clinton. The tribe's heritage c...

Image: NCDOTcommunications | CC BY 2.0

Sampson County, North Carolina: The Marion Butler Anomaly

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. For most of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the South was Democratic - what historians called the Solid South. Sampson County was not. It was one of seven North Carolina counties that voted for Wendell Willkie over Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, and one of fourteen that back...

Image: Nyttend | Public domain

Sampson County, North Carolina: Hogs and Hay and Heritage

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerry Dincher, CC BY-SA 2.0. Agriculture has been the spine of the Sampson economy from the beginning. The earliest industries were naval stores - tar, pitch, turpentine - tapped from longleaf pine forests by enslaved African Americans whose labor built the antebellum economy. After the Civil War the naval s...

Image: Gerry Dincher | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sampson County, North Carolina: People Who Came From Here

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nyttend, Public domain. The list of Sampson natives reads like a strange American almanac. Micajah Autry, a Sampson-born merchant and poet, died at the Alamo in 1836. William Rufus King, born in Sampson in 1786, was elected the thirteenth U.S. vice president in 1852 on a ticket with Franklin Pierce; he ...

Image: Nyttend | Public domain