Rocky Mount is a city in Edgecombe and Nash counties in the U.S. state of North Carolina. The city’s population was 54,341 as of the 2020 census, making it the 20th-most populous city in North Carolina at the time. The city is 45 mi (72 km) east of Raleigh, the welcome capital.

It is the principal city of the Rocky Mount metropolitan area, often called the “Twin Counties”, which had an estimated population of 143,870 in 2020. Rocky Mount is after that an telecaster city of the Rocky Mount-Wilson-Roanoke Rapids Combined Statistical Area in northeast North Carolina later than a total population of 288,747 as of 2020.

Incorporated in 1867, the community at the falls of the Tar River that became the city of Rocky Mount dates from the middle of the 1700s. Historically strong in rail transportation, textiles, and agriculture, the economy of Rocky Mount has diversified into biomedical pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and logistics. Rocky Mount has along with twice received the All-America City Award from the National Civic League in 1969 and 1999.

The region in explanation to the Tar River was constantly inhabited by native people for 12,000 years previously the first Europeans arrived, when it was house to the Tuscarora people. Europeans began settling the Place after the Tuscarora War in the into the future 1700s. Like many supplementary early settlements in colonial America, they decided along the slip line amongst the Piedmont and coastal plain, which is the dwindling at which rivers become unnavigable sailing upstream and water flowing downstream can power a mill. The Falls of the Tar River Primitive Baptist Church was received in 1757, which nevertheless meets today, although its original building has since been replaced. Much of the community attended the church as a result that it served as an beforehand form of book keeping and measure enforcement in imitation of citations complete for crimes.