Rocky Mount, NC news and local guide

People lived around the Tar River for 12,000 years, and it was long home to the Tuscarora, an Iroquoian-speaking people. After the Tuscarora War with English colonists and their Native allies in the early 1700s, most survivors moved north, and by 1722 the main group had settled in New York and become the Sixth Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. English-speaking settlers came to the Tar River at the fall line between the Piedmont and the coastal plain, where the river was navigable downstream and the drop could power mills. The Falls of the Tar River Primitive Baptist Church was founded in 1757. As the center of community life, its records were the village's first civil and vital records, and its congregation even handled law enforcement.

More about Rocky Mount

A post office opened at the falls on March 22, 1816, the first documented use of the name Rocky Mount, for the rocky mound at the falls. Rocky Mount Mills, the second cotton mill in North Carolina, was built there in 1818. Joel Battle, grandson of an early settler, bought out his partners and later turned it over to his cousin James Smith Battle. Until the 1850s the mill was worked by enslaved African Americans, who also did most of the work on the cotton plantations, and after that the owners hired only white women and girls for the rest of the century. The Battle family also helped build the Wilmington and Weldon Railroad, then the longest continuous railroad in the world. Sources Wikipedia: Rocky Mount, North Carolina