Richmond County is a county located on the central southern border of the U.S. state of North Carolina. Its county seat is Rockingham. The county was formed in 1779 from a portion of Anson County and named in honor of Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond and Lennox. As of the 2020 census, the population was 42,946.
Richmond County Courthouse in Rockingham
The Great Falls Cotton Mill was built in 1869.
Hamlet (pictured in 1912) developed as a railway town in the early 1900s.
A 1991 fire at the Imperial Food Products plant (pictured) in Hamlet led to 25 deaths and a record fine from state regulators.
Red Shirts (United States)
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The Red Shirts or Redshirts of the Southern United States were white supremacist paramilitary terrorist groups that were active in the late 19th century in the last years of, and after the end of, the Reconstruction era of the United States. Red Shirt groups originated in Mississippi in 1875, when anti-Reconstruction private terror units adopted red shirts to make themselves more visible and threatening to Southern Republicans, both whites and freedmen. Similar groups in the Carolinas also adopted red shirts.
Red Shirts at a polling place in Old Hundred, North Carolina, on Election Day, November 8, 1898
"Red Shirt" uniform displayed, at the North Carolina Museum of History, circa 1898–1900
Red Shirts in Laurinburg on election day, 1898