The final segment of Robert K. Thomas’s Report of Research on Lumbee Origins.  This was transcribed from a photocopy of an original report at the Wilson Library, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC in June of 2012.   Any comments I have will be made at the end of these transcriptions and it will be evident that they are mine.  To see more about Robert K. Thomas, go to:  http://works.bepress.com/robert_thomas/

(P 69) Part VII – Appendix

As I said in the previous section, if we really did this research up right we would know the history of all the Indians in eastern NC, southeastern Virginia and central SC, plus perhaps gather some very important material on the refugee tribals from the Granville-Edgecombe area who went west into the Appalachians.  So in this final section, I would like to say just briefly what we know about other Indian groups or what I suspect at this point about other Indian groups in this region.

First, let me examine the Haliwa.  At this point it looks as if the Richardsons were part of the Pan-Indian “pot” in the Granville-Edgecombe area in the 1750s.  By the 1770s the Richardsons had moved further west and were in Chatham County.  After the Revolution one of the Richardson brothers returned to Halifax County and was granted a large acreage of land in that area where he proceeded to raise a big family.  Other stragglers who had not moved out of this section west or south began to cluster around the Richardsons – Lynch, Harris and so forth.  Ater 1802, I think at least some of the remnants of the Tuscaroras in Bertie County moved into the Richardson area; the Copelands, Silvers and perhaps a few other families.  I have not seen Ernest Jaycock’s material so I am only guessing.  Some of these people who clustered around the Richardsons might also have been recent newcomers from Virginia into the area.  For instance, I suspect perhaps the Evans family was such a one.

The Coharie Siouan seem to be primarily Hatteras mixed with a few refugee tribals from the Granville-Edgecombe area who moved (p 70) in with the Hatteras to form a community on the Neuse.  The Indians in Hoke and Cumberland Counties are simply Lumbee “stragglers”.  The Indians in Montgomery County are Lumbees that moved west from Hoke County.

I would guess that the modern Waccamaws are the descendants of Indians who moved south from Sampson County or perhaps the Neuse, as well as Indians who came back into that area from SC; that is to say, some of the refugee tribals from the Granville-Edgecombe area who had gone to SC gravitated back to the Waccamaw Lake area.  I would guess that such is also true of Indians of western Columbus County.

The Indian groups in SC, except for the ones near Charleston and Cheraw, appear to be descendants of people from the Granville-Edgecombe area.  As I stated earlier many people went from the Granville-Edgecombe area directly to SC and then some of them came back to Robeson County in the late 1700s.  In the 20^th century of course, the Smilings moved en masse from Sumter County to Robeson County.

The small group of people known to whites as Marlboro Blues near Cheraw, SC are undoubtedly Cheraw Indians or at least Cheraw who have mixed in with Indian refugees from northeastern NC. 

The Indians near Hamlet in Richmond Co., NC seem to have moved over into NC from the Cheraw area sometime in the early part of the last century. 

There are two other groups in NC which are interesting as well.  One are the mixed-blood families who live near Wilmington on the Cape Fear and who I understand now identify as (P 71) black.  There is also a small group of people between Kinston and Snow Hill at a place called Brownstown who are also former Indians recently assimilated into the black population.  The Browns appear to me to be what remains of that old community on the Neuse and the Cape Fear people are “Indians” from the Granville-Edgecombe area who settled in that section and did not maintain their Indian identity.

The Indians in Person County are still somewhat of a puzzle to me.  I can find evidence of them in the 1760s on Island Creek where it runs into the Roanoke on the Virginia side, north of present-day Henderson, NC.  It looks to me that by 1850 they had moved farther west to the south of Clarksville and that after the Civil War they began to drift west and south into NC.  I do not think they are necessarily connected to the group formerly in Granville and Edgecombe Counties.  I would suspect that they are primarily Virginia Indians from the Powhatan area east of Richmond, but further research will have to tell us that.

The Indians further west near Stoneville, NC in Rockingham County who are primarily Goings and Harris seem to be simply drop offs from the main migration straight west from the NC frontier  to Newman’s Ridge, TN.

I have some idea now of the broad outlines of the history of the Indians in the Cumberland area of Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky but there needs to be quite a bit more work done in that widely scattered group.

The work on the Haliwa could be done very quickly as well as on the Indian groups in Sampson and Columbus Counties.  The (p 72) research on Person County Indians might be, however, a major job since they are not part of, or so it appears to me at this time, that general exodus out of the NC frontier in 1750 into other areas. 

There are a few Lumbee “off-shoots” I would like to visit in the near future – one group near Grouse in Lincoln County, NC; another at Swananoa near Asheville; and the last in Macon County near Franklin, NC.

I would, especially, like to look at the area of Skeetertown near Suffolk, VA.  I believe this formerly Indian, now black, community is the source of many of the families that went to the Granville-Edgecombe area in NC in 1750.

Roberta Estes:  Does anyone have, have access to or know the location of Ernest Jaycock’s work?