Henderson: Tobacco Town on the Fall Line

Henderson was chartered in eighteen forty-one and named for Leonard Henderson, the first chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. The town's growth tracked the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad, which gave Piedmont tobacco farmers a route to market. By eighteen eighty Henderson had five tobacco factories, three warehouses, three cotton gins, and roughly twenty mercantile stores.

When Vance County was carved from surrounding counties in eighteen eighty-one, Henderson became the county seat, named in turn for Zebulon Vance, North Carolina's Civil War governor and later a U.S. senator.

The tobacco economy held the town together well into the twentieth century, and Henderson today remains the commercial center of one of the state's northernmost Piedmont counties, sitting close enough to the Virginia line to feel like a border town.