Princeville: First Chartered African-American Town in the United States

This project is a collaboration between the East Carolina University Departments of Sociology and History and Program in Maritime Studies (Funded by the North Carolina Humanities Council).

Project Goals

This project addresses the challenge of the deterioration and potential disappearance of Princeville, both physically and in the collective memories of North Carolinians.

Funded by the North Carolina Humanities Council, this is a Grassroots Community Project that is a collaboration between East Carolina University (specifically, departments of Sociology and History) and Freedom Org of Edgecombe County, North Carolina.

This project lasted from November 2018 through January 2020, and includes:

  • Oral Histories of Princeville Residents
  • Development of a Digital Collection of Historical and Current information about Princeville
  • Archeological exploratory surveys of the Tar River at Princeville
  • A community workshop for public education
  • An exhibit for display in libraries and other venues

Why this is important:

First, a number of general house items were lost to the Tar River at the Shiloh Landing and other locations up and down and along the Tar River from countless floods over the years. There may be artifacts in the river sediment for other reasons, such as traditional rituals of tossing items in the river.

Second, there have been proposals to merge Princeville into the neighboring Tarboro, a town with which Princeville has had a symbiotic relationship, offering public school for some grade levels but also housing those whose wealth was built from Princeville labor. Such an effort, which the town has resisted, would symbolically erase the significant moment of the independent founding of Freedom Hill and the fraught historical memory of Shiloh Landing.

Third, although the North Carolina governor’s office solicited detailed plans by university design teams and local residents for Princeville’s development, preservation, and protection from the river following the 2016 floods, those plans have yet to be realized fully.

Fourth, the historical significance of this town is not widely documented and taught to North Carolinians, including in the public school system.

Given the resurgence of polarized divisions regarding race in  North Carolina and the United States currently, there is a critical need for university-community partnerships to intervene thoughtfully and with solid research into what is termed “memory politics”—the importance of landscape symbols to identities and movements for social justice. There is also a need to raise awareness among the larger population surrounding Princeville and beyond of the town as a cultural resource for the state.