Princeville is a town in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, United States established by freed slaves after the Civil War. It was received in 1865 and known as Freedom Hill. It was incorporated in 1885 as Princeville, the first independently governed African American community chartered in the United States.

Princeville is part of the Rocky Mount, North Carolina Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of the 2020 census, the town population was 1,254 residents. The town is on the opposite bank of the Tar River from Tarboro. The city of Rocky Mount is 16 miles (26 km) to the west.

As the American Civil War reached its conclusion, formerly enslaved African Americans sought refuge at a stand-in Union encampment south of Tarboro, North Carolina along the Tar River. These inhabitants developed their own makeshift pact at the site and chose the declare Freedom Hill in acceptance of a little raised area where a Union soldier first announced the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1873, community aficionado Turner Prince joined his companions in purchasing portions of the estate and used his carpentry skills to begin building surviving homes. This created a nice of racialized topography afterward the black community upon a swampy floodplain and white citizens upon safer estate above. White estate owners made no effort to argument the black residents’ presence, since they found the swampy terrain to be of little use, and preferred to have them kept away from white residents in Tarboro. Some of the landowners eventually sold their holdings to the black residents. Viewing state response as an important bordering step in establishing their identity as release citizens, the community successfully petitioned the North Carolina Legislature for engagement in 1885. Despite requests to pick a reveal memorializing President Garfield, the extra town then again called itself Princeville to great compliment its founder.

During Reconstruction, the town pursued hypothetical opportunities and worked gone Henry C. Cherry, one of the first black representatives serving in the North Carolina Legislature, to demand a schoolteacher from the American Missionary Association. Robert S. Taylor soon arrived and began bolster as an educator and important community leader gone a career including terms as a county justice of the peace and disclose senator. In 1880, the town’s population was primarily engaged in nonagricultural occupations subsequent to a bright workforce including, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, nurses, and six schoolteachers. The Princeville Graded School, the town’s public school, held its first classes in 1883 and began organizing graduation exercises by 1909.