Rich Square

History

Quakers were some of the earliest settlers in Northampton County, being established there by the early 1750s. The congregation in Rich Square was established in 1760, and was once a center for the Religious Society of Friends in North Carolina. By 1832, they were a minority in Rich Square, though they continued working to relocate former slaves into free states. In 1947, Godwin Bush was a black man in Northampton County who escaped a lynching by a white mob; two all-white grand juries refused to indict the seven white kidnappers. In response, local pastor and businessman Paul A. Bishop promoted a black-led boycott of white-owned businesses in Rich Square (contemporaneously described by a black community leader as "a town that didn't like black folk.") Many of the boycotted stores went out of business. On July 26, 1959, Lieutenant Colonel William Rankin was flying his US Marine Corps F8U Crusader from Naval Air Station South Weymouth in Massachusetts to Naval Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina. When he lost all power at an altitude of , he ejected into the air and began uncontrolled decompression through an intense thunderstorm and hail for the next 40 minutes. After "the most prolonged and fantastic parachute descent in history", he eventually landed near Rich Square, from where he was rescued by a local farmer and eventually taken to Ahoskie, North Carolina for triage. (The plane came down near Scotland Neck, North Carolina.) In 1968, the federal government of the United States established the Family Development Training Project in Rich Square, an effort up uplift families in poverty by simultaneously educating all members thereof at government expense. On a parcel of town, twelve training and support buildings were constructed to support the 50…

Geography

The town of Rich Square is located in Northampton County, North Carolina, at , with an elevation of .

Race & ethnicity