08/29/2026
In 1865 a group of freed people looked at a swampy floodplain nobody else wanted and decided it would do. That decision is still standing in Edgecombe County. 🌾
They settled across the Tar River south of Tarboro, on low land belonging to white planters named John Lloyd and Lafayette Dancy. They called it Freedom Hill, after the small rise where Union soldiers had announced the end of the war. Nobody moved to evict them, because the ground was considered worthless. By the 1870s residents were buying lots outright. The 1880 count found 379 people living there: fifty five day laborers, laundresses and washerwomen, eight carpenters, seven blacksmiths, four grocers, three seamstresses, three brick masons. One of those carpenters was a formerly enslaved man named Turner Prince, who had been there since the beginning. When the town incorporated on 20 February 1885, the residents renamed it for him.
North Carolina's state history office calls Princeville the oldest town in the country chartered and governed by Black Americans. Holding onto it took work. In 1903 the town beat back a campaign to have its charter revoked, pushed by the local white supremacist newspaper, which wanted Tarboro to annex it outright. Princeville had opened a public school in 1883 with principals trained at Oberlin and Yale, added a high school course in 1912, and kept electing its own officials through the years when Black voters were being stripped out of state and federal politics everywhere around it. ✊🏾
Then there is the water. The Tar flooded the town two years after its founding, and again in 1919, 1924, 1928, 1940 and 1958. After that last one the town went to the Army Corps of Engineers, and by 1967 a three mile earthen levee stood along the south bank. It was built for thirty seven feet of water. The river had never topped thirty three. In September 1999 Hurricane Floyd sent it over, the d**e failed, and parts of town went twenty three feet under. Ten days for the water to leave. The town had every reason to give up the ground and did not.
