Tar River Flood Zones and the Princeville Recovery Story, Edgecombe County, NC

Two catastrophic floods, and a documented refusal to simply walk away

The Tar River crested at 41.5 feet at Tarboro after Hurricane Floyd in 1999 -- a level exceeding 500-year flood standards in parts of the area -- and again at 36.2 feet after Hurricane Matthew in 2016, a second catastrophic flood in less than two decades. Princeville, a town within Edgecombe County founded as Freedom Hill in 1865 by formerly enslaved people and incorporated in 1885, sits on especially low-lying land along the Tar and was devastated by both events -- nearly every home in town was damaged after Floyd, with parts of Princeville left more than 20 feet underwater.

What happened after Matthew is the more distinctive, less commonly told part of the story. The State of North Carolina offered Princeville a wholesale buyout of its flooded homes through FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program -- the same basic tool many repeatedly flooded communities nationwide have used to simply relocate a town's population and let the floodplain revert to open land. Princeville's leadership deliberately turned it down, choosing to rebuild instead, on the stated grounds that the town's historical and cultural significance as the first town in the United States chartered by Black Americans was too important to abandon. That's a genuinely consequential local decision for anyone evaluating land in or near Princeville today: unlike a fully bought-out floodplain community, Princeville's flood-prone lots remain in private hands rather than having been wholesale converted to public open space.

Managed retreat while rebuilding: relocation to annexed higher ground

Rather than a simple binary between "rebuild everything in place" and "abandon the town," Princeville developed its own documented middle path, studied closely enough to appear as its own case in the federal/academic Adaptation Clearinghouse database: annexing new "higher ground receiving areas" within an expanded town boundary and relocating flood-vulnerable residents to them, while preserving and rebuilding the town's historic, low-lying core rather than emptying it out entirely. This means the practical flood-risk picture for land in and around Princeville today is genuinely uneven parcel to parcel -- some areas were specifically identified and annexed as safer relocation ground, while the original, historically low-lying town center remains occupied and rebuilt despite its documented repeat-flood history.

2024-2025: turning flood-prone lots into conservation and food-growing space

This is an active effort today, not a closed historical chapter. The Conservation Trust for North Carolina (CTNC) is currently working with the Town of Princeville to convert vacant and underutilized parcels -- land left empty specifically because of its flood exposure -- into conservation-benefit uses, including managed wetlands and a model community garden, rather than leaving those lots as either derelict vacant land or a target for risky rebuilding. Separately, in 2024, NC State University's Coastal Dynamics Design Lab was contracted to build "floodprints" (a resilience-focused planning and design methodology) for six additional North Carolina communities, extending an approach informed in part by Princeville's own decades of hard-won flood-recovery experience to other flood-prone places statewide.

What this means for land near the Tar River in Edgecombe County today

Three practical takeaways for a buyer: (1) get a current FEMA flood-zone determination and base flood elevation for any specific parcel near the Tar River or its tributaries -- the county's historical crest figures are a strong warning sign but not a substitute for parcel-specific flood mapping; (2) if you're evaluating a parcel in or near Princeville specifically, ask the town and Edgecombe County Planning directly whether it sits within one of the annexed higher-ground receiving areas, within the original flood-prone core, or on a vacant lot that may be part of CTNC's ongoing conservation-conversion effort -- the answer materially changes both the parcel's flood exposure and its realistic development future; and (3) remember Edgecombe County's zoning-before-septic sequence and flood damage prevention ordinance (covered on the county's general hub) still govern construction requirements in any mapped floodplain, regardless of the broader Princeville recovery story.