America’s oldest Black town, threatened by floods, searches for a Plan B

A quarter-mile away, the Tar River — Princeville’s longtime nemesis — rolled on quietly, north to south.

The Tar and its latent forces were the reason for this meeting. Princeville, the oldest Black-chartered town in the United States, has suffered through at least nine hurricanes and floods since it was established at the end of the Civil War. They’re only getting worse. In 1999, Hurricane Floyd breached the town’s levee and left 10 feet of standing water for two weeks, destroying nearly 1,000 buildings. Floyd was followed in 2016 by Matthew, which again breached the levee and demolished half the town.

“Before Matthew, there were 2,300 households in Princeville, and 1,592 after,” said Glenda Knight, Princeville’s town manager.

Those who remain are a determined lot. After Floyd, the federal government proposed turning the historic town into an uninhabited national park and moving its citizens to higher ground. Princeville’s town commissioners were split on the proposal; the mayor broke the tie by voting against it.

After every flood, some people do leave town, but most residents of the overwhelmingly Black community are adamant about rebuilding. “They say: ‘This is who we are. This is sacred ground. Our forefathers shed blood, sweat and tears here,’” said Princeville Mayor Bobbie Jones.

Which is why the meeting on Jan. 4 was so tense.

In 2016, Congress authorized a plan to extend the town’s 1967 levee to protect against rising waters. Four years later, Congress appropriated $39.6 million to carry it out. Residents were determined to protect a place that was not only their home, but also a crucial piece of Black history.

But in June 2023, representatives of the Army Corps met with town officials to share bad news. Revised modeling showed the new levee would threaten thousands of buildings across the river in Tarboro, as well as upstream and downstream as far as Greenville. The plan to save historic Princeville was no longer viable.

The mayor and commissioners then had the unenviable task of informing Princeville’s citizens. Now, at the Jan. 4 meeting, they were telling the Army Corps how they felt. They were, one woman said, “sick and tired of being sick and tired — and being scared every time there’s a hurricane.”

Princeville was established in 1865 as Freedom Hill when a group of freed Black people traveling with the Union army to Tarboro settled across the river in a swampy flood plain. In 1885, the townspeople petitioned Congress to name the town after Turner Prince, a carpenter who had built many of its structures. Congress had wanted to name it after the recently assassinated President James Garfield; the residents prevailed.

By then, the town had grown from around 25 people to nearly 300, according to North Carolina historian Kelsi Dew, and new residents kept arriving. “There was the attraction of an independent Black town where people were welcome,” she said.

Black people in Princeville had an advantage over their counterparts across the river — they could vote for mayor, while Black residents of majority-White Tarboro weren’t allowed to vote at all. “And Blacks could shop anytime, not just on Sunday,” Dew said. “That was different from Tarboro.”

But the early 20th century saw a rise in white supremacy and racial hatred in the region — and a rise in the Tar River as well. A major flood hit Princeville in 1919, and the population dropped as people moved to East Tarboro, which needed laborers.

More residents came in the next few decades, but so did more floods. After Hurricane Hazel roared through in 1954, the Army Corps got involved and built the levee that was completed in 1967. “After the levee was built, there was a major rise in population because there was security,” Dew said.

Princeville would thrive over time, with as many as 35 Black-owned businesses, though that number declined after integration in the 1960s allowed Black Princeville residents to patronize White-owned stores and businesses across the river.

Since he was elected mayor in 2013, Jones has worked to keep 15 to 20 Black-owned businesses — and their tax base — in town. About 2,000 people now live in Princeville; 90 percent are Black, 7 percent are Hispanic and 3 percent are White.

In 2017, a year after Hurricane Matthew, Gavin Smith — then a professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence — organized a five-day design workshop for the town, inviting planners, engineers and architects from across the country.

The goal was to develop a plan for Princeville that was flood-resilient, safe and welcoming, including a new 53-acre tract of land outside the flood plain where essential services would move. “From a planning perspective, it would mitigate the risk while celebrating the history,” Jones said.

Smaller projects came out of the workshop, too, including a heritage trail to emphasize the town’s history and a mobile history museum that could be taken to other communities to tell the Princeville story — a temporary replacement for a visitor center and museum wiped out by floods from Floyd and Matthew.

The North Carolina State University Coastal Dynamics Design Lab, which initiated the projects, “prioritized local values and localized environmental interventions for community resilience that the town itself could control” as it waited for the Army Corps’ intervention, said the lab’s director, Andrew Fox.

State funds have enabled one existing home to be elevated on stilts, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency committed funds to raise 22 more on concrete blocks. Six homeowners within town limits have opted for buyouts and demolition from FEMA and the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency (NCORR), according to Knight, the town manager.

That leaves “checkerboard” conditions where some parcels of land are vacant, said Smith, now a professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning at NC State. “It tears apart the physical conditions of the community,” he said. But it also offers opportunities. On a half-acre site where two homes were demolished, the Conservation Trust for North Carolina raised $300,000 to create a community garden that will be planted in March — a boon for a town that’s become a food desert in recent years.

Meanwhile, NCORR will use $850,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to repair damaged parts of the levee and four floodgates washed out during Matthew. Tracey Colores, NCORR’s community development director, hopes to start construction this summer.

That will restore basic protection from normal elevated water levels from the river — but not from hurricanes. “The current system does not provide hurricane-induced flooding protection from storms like Floyd and Matthew,” she said.

NCORR has pledged $3.5 million for infrastructure in the 53-acre parcel outside the flood plain. A FEMA grant will fund construction of a fire station, town hall annex and other facilities on that parcel, and a farmers market is scheduled to open there in March.

Pending environmental approval, NCORR will also fund construction of 50 public housing units there.

All this stems from a push by citizens determined to save their heritage and their town. “The image I see is people leaning in — nobody is sitting back and saying: ‘You need to do this for us,’” Colores said. “It’s everybody working together to make something happen.”

Princeville’s citizens were disappointed by the Army Corps’ decision to abandon the levee extension, but the reality is that the town is sited on a difficult 90-degree bend in the Tar River. The Corps doesn’t build projects for 500- or 1,000-year storms like Floyd — even if they’re becoming more common.

“It’s a very tough, complex problem to solve,” said Army Corps spokesman Dave Connolly. “Just look at the terrain and you’ll see that.”

But Princeville holds one more backup plan. In 2019, it acquired 88 more acres adjacent to its 53 acres outside the flood plain.

Now, a town known for its past has to figure out how to use that land for its future.

J. Michael Welton is the author of “Drawing From Practice: Architects and the Meaning of Freehand.” His articles have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Metropolis, Dwell and the News & Observer in Raleigh. He is editor and publisher of the digital design magazine Architects + Artisans.