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Robeson County is in the U.S. state of North Carolina. As of 2004, the county had a population of 126,469-- an increase of 2.54% from the 2000 census. Robeson County was incorporated in 1787 from Bladen County, North Carolina, and was named in honor of Col. Thomas Robeson of Tar Heel, North Carolina for his Revolutionary War service. While Col. Robeson never lived in the county that now bears his name, toward the end of the war in 1781, he and 70 colonial rebels defeated an army of 400 loyalists at the Battle of Elizabethtown. Lumberton6 is the county seat.
History
Archaeological excavation performed in Robeson County reveals a long and rich history of widespread and consistent occupation of the region, most especially near the Lumbee, or Lumber River since the end of the last Ice Age. Local excavations indicate that Native American peoples made stone tools using materials brought into present-day Robeson County from the Carolina Piedmont. The large amounts of ancient pottery found at some Robeson County sites have been dated to the early Woodland period, and suggest that Native American settlements around the river were part of an extensive trade network with other regions. If anything, portions of the river basin show that Robeson County was a "zone of cultural interactions." After colonial contact, European-made items, such as kaolin tobacco pipes, were traded by the Spanish, French, and the English to Native American peoples of the coast, and found their way to the Robeson County region long before Europeans established permanent settlements along the Lumbee, or Lumber River. Swamps, streams, and artesian wells provided an excellent supply of water for Native peoples. Fish was plentiful, and the regions lush vegetation included numerous food crops. "Carolina bays" continue to dot the landscape, and, if the sheer number of 10,000 year old Clovis points found along their banks are any indication, Native peoples found these unique depressions filled with water to be ideal campsites. Colonial IncursionsEarly written sources specific to the Robeson County region are few for the post-contact period of European colonization. Surveyors for the Wineau factory charted a village of Waccamaw Indians on the Lumber River, a few miles west of the present-day town of Pembroke, North Carolina on a map in 1725. In 1754, North Carolina Governor Arthur Dobbs received a report from his agent, Col. Rutherford, the head of a Bladen County, North Carolina militia, that a "mixed crew" of 50 Indian families were living along Drowning Creek. The communication also reported the shooting of a surveyor who entered the area "to view vacant lands." These are the first written account of the Native peoples from whom the Lumbee descend. RefugeesBladen County, North Carolina encompassed a portion of what is today Robeson County, and the Lumbee, or Lumber River was at this time called by English colonials, "Drowning Creek." After the violent upheavals of the Yamasee War in 1712, and the Tuscarora War in 1715, families of Waccamaw Indians had left South Carolina Colony in 1718, and had very likely established a village west of present-day Pembroke, North Carolina by 1725. The “mixed crew” that Rutherford observed in 1754 were located in the same locale as the earlier Waccamaw settlement. The research of the noted anthropologist, John R. Swanton of the Smithsonian Institution corroborates much of the oral tradition of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County. Swanton posited that the Lumbee were the descendants of Siouan peoples of which the most prominent were the Cheraw and Keyauwee. These communities that would later comprise the Lumbee would also have included Siouan refugee groups of the Eno, Shakori, as well as coastal groups such as the Waccamaw and Cape Fear Indians. Interestingly, colonial migrants to the present-day Robeson County Lumber River basin came into contact with an acculturated population of Native Americans who reportedly spoke some English, owned European trade goods, and used primitive English-style farm tools in their agricultural pursuits. By then, English, Gaelic speaking highland Scots, and Welsh colonials had begun to make their way from present-day Fayetteville, North Carolina, to Laurinburg, North Carolina, and eventually, to Drowning Creek, or the present-day Lumbee, or Lumber River. Critical to keep in mind is that at the same time that Native peoples were fleeing into the Robeson County region and seeking refuge from the incalculable destruction of warfare and disease, European colonials were in pursuit, attempting to gain a foothold, then wrest control of the resessed region of Robeson County. By the mid-eighteenth century, Indians continued to populate the Lumber River basin area and its numerous tributaries. whites slowly moved into and established settlements, but overall, they initially lived on the periphery of those lands to which the ancestors of the Lumbee had managed to secure title with the colonial administration of North Carolina. The main Indian settlements during the late eighteenth century were Prospect and Red Banks. Individual land ownership by Native Americans had far-reaching consequences for the history of Robeson County in that Native peoples were less subject to the political and economic dominance of whites, managing to live in a homogeneous network of settlements that provided social and cultural security. Nineteenth CenturyBy the middle of the nineteenth century however, settlement patterns had shifted: now ancestral Lumbee settlements were interspersed among faster growing white communities, and the name of the region's river was changed again. A lottery was used to dispose of lots with which to establish Lumberton. The town was later incorporated in 1788, and John Willis proposed the name "Lumberton" for the site, the name of which derives from either the Lumbee, or Lumber River, or is a reference to the lumber and naval stores industry that began to dominate, and continued to dominate the economy of Robeson County throughout the nineteenth century. The section of the Lumbee, or Lumber River where Lumberton is located was known throughout that century as "Drowning Creek", a name by which portions of the river are still known. But then, in 1809, Drowning Creek was renamed the Lumber River. The first Robeson County, North Carolina courthouse was erected on land which formed a part of the "Red Bluff Plantation" owned by Lumberton founder, John Willis. Robeson County's post office was established in 1794, and much like today, from the end of the eighteenth- to the mid-nineteenth centuries, numerous languages could be heard throughout Robeson County: the Gaelic of the highland Scots and the Welsh, English, and one can speculate, remnant Siouan, Algonkian, and Iroquoian languages of the ancestral Lumbee. The Civil WarBy the beginning of the American Civil War, most Native Americans attempted to eke out an impoverished existence. Their status had continued to decline. Since 1790, Native Americans in the southern states were enumerated as "free persons of color" on the local and federal census. By 1835, and in the wake of the convergence of three historical events, Nat Turner's Rebellion, the ratification of the North Carolina Constitutional Convention, and Indian Removal, they were summarily stripped of their previously held right to vote, serve on juries, own and use firearms, and to learn to read and write. The gradual dispossession of tribal lands accelerated, and Robeson County's Native Americans regarded the local white slave-owning elite as robbers and oppressors. Henry Berry Lowrie's War on Robeson CountyRobeson County entered the American Civil War in 1861. After a major yellow fever epidemic the following year wherein 10 percent of the Cape Fear region's population succumbed to the disease, and free labor either joined the war effort or fled the region, Indians, along with African-American slaves, were forcibly conscripted to build a system of forts intended to defend the Gibralter of the South, Fort Fisher, near Wilmington, North Carolina. North Carolina's adjutant general, John C. Gorman noted in his reports that Robeson County's conscription of several years duration especially impacted, "Scuffletown [which] was included in the impressment and almost ever able-bodied male in the [Indian] settlements was dragged from home and railroaded to the coast." Pembroke was then known as "Scuffletown," and three of the "able-bodied" Indians to which Gorman referred were the cousins of Henry Berry Lowrie who, after escaping from the disease-ridden conditions of Fort Fisher, were murdered by a local member of Robeson County's home guard. At this same time, William Tecumseh Sherman and his army began to push their way toward Robeson County. After his army sacked and burned Columbia, South Carolina on February 17, 1865, Robesonians to the north held their breath. Washington Chaffin, a prominent white Methodist minister in Lumberton nervously speculated in his diary about what the county could expect from Sherman and the Yankees. At the same time, Chaffin made reference to the young Indian, Henry Berry Lowrie and his guerilla band's campaign against those local Robeson County white elites who were "doing much mischief in this country." Moreover, they had "torn up and destroyed" elite white homesteads. Paranoid about Sherman's imminent approach, and fearful of Yankees in their midst, Robeson County's home guard, which included county magistrates, clergymen, and lawyers who largely represented the interests of the county's planter class, raided the farmstead of Allen Lowrie, Henry Berry Lowrie's father, and murdered the old man and one of his sons. Henry Berry Lowrie swore revenge, and two days after Allen and William Lowrie's funerals, local Lumbee guides helped Sherman's army cross the Lumber River through torrential rains and into North Carolina. According to Sherman, the trek across the Lumber River, and through the swamps, pocosins, and creeks of Robeson County "was the damnest marching I ever saw." And for the next ten years, Robeson County was at war with Henry Berry Lowrie, the Lumbee community, and its poor black and white residents. Twentieth CenturyUntil late in the 20th Century, Robeson County was a center of Ku Klux Klan activity and support in North Carolina. On January 18, 1958, armed Lumbee Native Americans chased off an estimated 50 Klansmen and supporters led by grand wizard James W. "Catfish" Cole at the town of Maxton in the Battle of Hayes Pond. Timeline
Population History
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