Rock Hill is the largest city in York County, South Carolina and the fifth-largest city in the state. It is moreover the fourth-largest city of the Charlotte metropolitan area, behind Charlotte, Concord, and Gastonia (all located in North Carolina, unlike Rock Hill). As of the 2020 census, the population was 74,372.

The city is located nearly 25 miles (40 km) south of Charlotte and nearly 70 miles (110 km) north of Columbia.

Rock Hill offers scenic riverfront views along the Catawba River and is home to numerous birds trails, restaurants, and thirty-one parks which are used for both national and local events. Its historic downtown consist of twelve contiguous buildings built as to the lead as 1840 offering dining and retail options. The city is also home to three colleges, including Winthrop University, a public broadminded arts the academy founded in 1886 which enrolls approximately 6,000 students annually.

Although some European settlers had already arrived in the Rock Hill Place in the 1830s and 1840s, Rock Hill did not become an actual town until the Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad Company made the decision to send a rail line through the area. Originally, the railroad had hoped to construct a station in the manageable village of Ebenezerville which was squarely in the midst of Charlotte, North Carolina and Columbia, South Carolina. When approached, however, the locals in Ebenezerville refused to have the railroad manage through their village past they considered it filthy and noisy. Instead, engineers and surveyors fixed to direct the extraction two miles away by a local landmark. According to some, the engineers marked the spot on the map and named it “rocky hill.”^: 26