Lumberton, North Carolina

Lumberton was established in seventeen eighty-seven on the Lumber River in what is now Robeson County, named for the Lumber River, which early settlers used to float timber downstream to the coast. The county it anchors is one of the most racially diverse in North Carolina, home to the Lumbee Tribe, the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi without full federal recognition. Lumberton's courthouse square has presided over Robeson County politics for more than two centuries. The city of about nineteen thousand sits at the intersection of Interstate Ninety-Five and US Seventy-Four, and it bore severe flooding during Hurricanes Floyd in nineteen ninety-nine and Matthew in twenty sixteen.