Bolton is a town in Columbus County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 691 at the 2010 census.

Bolton was traditional in 1899 and named for the Bolton Lumber Company. It became an incorporated community in 1915.

In 1981 undercover agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation were investigating corruption in Columbus County as share of the Colcor investigation. As ration of their inquiry into election fraud, the agents pretended to be assimilation in launch a bar in Bolton. They pushed for a referendum to legalize liquor-by-the-drink in the town and paid local politician Herbert Riggins to purchase votes in their favor, the first times the FBI had ever attempted to exploitation a public election. The referendum was held on April 30, 1982 with a majority of local residents like-minded of legalizing liquor-by-the-drink, though Riggins mostly avoided involving himself in the vote. The North Carolina State Board of Elections cutting edge nullified the referendum.

The Colcor affair was followed by a series of other scandals which embroiled the town, beginning as soon as the shooting of the town’s first black mayor in 1990 by a white State Highway Patrolman. Civil rights groups responded by launching the “Bolton Movement”, a series of protests across the county, which led to the Ku Klux Klan hosting counterprotests in the town. A few years difficult the mayor and an alderman pled no contest to charges of mismanaging the town’s finances. In 2002 the Bolton police chief was placed on administrative depart after allegedly attacking a couple in the town hall who were complaining virtually police brutality.