The Rocks Under Our Feet – Guest Blogger: Rev. Peter H. Gilliland

Rocky Mount, NC, is fascinating in all sorts of ways, and its history offers us marvelous examples of why people do what they do. One of the great questions to start with is, “why is Rocky Mount HERE?”

Most of us will have automatically answered: “Because of the Falls of the Tar River,” but that is only part of the answer. The larger answer is, “because of the Fall Line.”

The Fall Line is the name of a geologic feature, the rough line of hard igneous and metamorphic rock that runs up the eastern side of North America and separates the coastal plain from the upland region to the west. On navigable rivers, this line of rock has waterfalls and marks the end of navigation from the coast.

So, the Fall Line gave us The Falls of the Tar River. But it did a lot more than that. It gave us a railway, a city, a highway, and weather.

In 1840, when someone decided to build a railway from Wilmington to Raleigh, they did not figure on the Fall Line, so they got to Faison and were surprised when they encountered a wall of rock, the Fall Line!

Working with slave labor, and with no good, cheap explosives (they had gunpowder), it was going to be really expensive to get over that line of rock. Besides, they didn’t have good capitalization from the Raleigh area, so they went looking for other investors.

On a map of North Carolina, you can see where that first railway line gets to Faison and makes a hard right turn along, and outside of, the Fall Line, heading for the town of Weldon and the rocks of the Roanoke River. That line happened to come past – you guessed it! – the rocky mound in the Tar River.

There is more. You see, when you build a station for a steam locomotive, you need access to two things: fuel and water. The water was available from the Tar River, and fuel arrived as firewood on wagons.

Of course, with those old steam trains, you needed to be able to start your train heading downhill, whichever way you were headed, so your stations needed to be on top of hills. The water tower was preferably on top of the hill, as was the wagon road.

After all, the firewood, as well as goods for transport, needed to be kept out of the mud as much as possible. And that is why the Rocky Mount train station is where it is, with the City built around it.

Oh yes! And that wagon road eventually became US Highway 64.
Geology strikes again!

Eventually, in about 1958, someone decided to build an Interstate Highway. Along came Interstate 95, and the Fall Line again showed the engineers where to put it. Geology, again!

And there is weather. Have you noticed that the weather men often refer to “the I-95 corridor?” That is more than just a handy spatial reference. We can actually watch the weather change within a very short east-west distance here!

An elevation of even a few feet can alter wind movement and modify weather patterns, which then manifest as a difference in rain patterns or where the tornado strikes. There is even a place in Wilson County that seems to have had more than its share of tornadoes. Its name? Rock Ridge.

That geologic rocky ridge, the Fall Line, put us here, and it continues to affect our lives in real time. Watch for it, and marvel. The rocks under our feet are an important part of our lives.

Rev. Peter H. Gilliland, 10/01/2025

Thank you, Peter, for this information. We are at our best as students, learning something new everyday. It keeps us young and smarter. To know you is to love you, and the Rocky Mount family relishes you always. SFH