Founding Although some European settlers had already arrived in the Rock Hill area in the 1830s and 1840s, Rock Hill did not become an actual town until the
Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad Company made the decision to send a rail line through the area. Originally, the railroad had hoped to build a station in the nearby village of
Ebenezerville which was squarely between
Charlotte, North Carolina and
Columbia, South Carolina. When approached, however, the locals in Ebenezerville refused to have the railroad run through their village since they considered it dirty and noisy. Instead, engineers and surveyors decided to run the line two miles away by a local landmark. According to some, the engineers marked the spot on the map and named it "rocky hill." Some of Rock Hill's early founding families—the White family, the Black family, and the Moores—believed that having a rail depot so close to them would be advantageous, so they decided to give the Columbia and Charlotte Railroad the right of way through their properties. As they were the three largest landowners in the area, this settled the matter.
George Pendleton White contracted with the railroad to build a section of the line. Construction began in 1848. The first passenger train arrived on March 23, 1852. A few weeks later, on April 17, 1852, the first Rock Hill Post Office opened. As their actions gained widespread national news coverage, the tactic was adopted by other civil rights groups. The men became known as the
Friendship Nine because eight of the nine men were students at Rock Hill's
Friendship Junior College. Later in 1961, Rock Hill was the first stop in the
Deep South for a group of 13
Freedom Riders, who boarded buses in Washington, DC, and headed South to test the
1960 ruling by the
U.S. Supreme Court outlawing racial segregation in all interstate public facilities. When the civil rights leader
John Lewis and another black man stepped off the bus at Rock Hill, they were beaten by a white mob that was uncontrolled by police. The event drew national attention. In 2002, Lewis, by then a US Congressman from
Georgia, returned to Rock Hill, where he had been invited as a speaker at
Winthrop University and was given the
key to the city. On January 21, 2008, Rep. Lewis returned to Rock Hill again and spoke at the city's
Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance. Mayor Doug Echols officially apologized to him on the city's behalf for the Freedom Riders' treatment in the city. .
20th century to present Rock Hill experienced steady growth in the twentieth century. The city boundary expanded far beyond its original limits. Four
unincorporated communities of York County were annexed into the city including
Boyd Hill in the late 1940s,
Ebenezer and Mexico in the 1960s, and
Oakdale in the 1980s. Rock Hill celebrated its
centennial in 1952 and its
sesquicentennial in 2002. Rock Hill hosted the 2017 UCI BMX World Championships at the Rock Hill BMX Supercross Track in Riverwalk with an estimated direct economic impact of $19.2 million. On April 7, 2021, former
NFL player
Phillip Adams shot and killed six people, including two children, at a house in Rock Hill. He committed suicide the next day. ==Geography==