The Lumbee people, many of them residents of Robeson County, North Carolina, but some of whom made their way to Bulloch County, Georgia, more than a century ago, have always proudly maintained their American Indian identity, Brent Tharp, Ph.D., noted in his most recent presentation for the Bulloch County Historical Society.

Their solidarity and pride as a Native American tribe has persisted in spite of evidence of racial diversity in their communities, including European and African, as well  as Native American, ancestry and the tradition that they are descended in part from the British settlers of the 1587 Lost Colony at Roanoke Island. That tradition, and the previous identification of the Lumbee as “Croatan,” gives the “Croatan Indian Memorial Cemetery” in the Adabelle area of southwestern Bulloch County its name. Tharp, the Historical Society’s vice president and also director of the Georgia Southern University Museum, gave a summary of their history during the society’s March 25 lunch meeting.

“In discussing the Croatan Indians in Bulloch County, it’s hard to decide when or even where to begin the story,” Tharp said.

He began, at first, with the 1890 migration of a community of people “called Croatan Indians, now called Lumbees,” nearly 300 miles from their home in Robeson County to Bulloch.

“They moved to Bulloch County in search of economic opportunities that they knew best, in the turpentine industry,” he said. “Here, they established homes, a school, a church and a cemetery,” he said. “For the most part, the Croatan Indians did not assimilate with other, black or white, families in Bulloch County, but for the next 30 years they were born, worked and died as a closeknit community, maintaining a sense of themselves as a distinct Indian people.”

Then he flashbacked to the late 1400s, when the ancestors of the Croatan in North Carolina lived much like the Native American groups in Georgia, residing on the banks of rivers and creeks, farming  corn, beans and squash supplemented by game and being led by chiefdoms in mound cities. These groups became the first Native Americans to meet and interact with European sailors and explorers, “with disastrous results … decimating the native population” and  bringing an end to their cultural structures.

The Lost Colony

In 1587, a group of pioneer immigrants from England – 117 men, women and children led by Gov. John White – landed at Roanoke Island to found a colony, arriving too late in summer to grow food for the winter. White sailed back to England seeking more provisions but was prevented from obtaining them and sailing again because of England’s war with Spain.

When he at last returned to Roanoke three years later, he found the colony completely abandoned and the mysterious word “Croatoan” carved into a gate post. In the 1600s and 1700s, various adventurers and settlers in Virginia and North Carolina told of encountering Native Americans who dressed like Englishmen, grew beards or exhibited other European traits.

“The Lost Colony, as it became known, according to the traditions of the Lumbee Indians was never lost at all,” Tharp said. “Rather, many if not most Lumbee Indians  understand that they are descended from the survivors of the Lost Colony, who out of necessity to  survive moved inland  and mixed with the remnants of eastern North Carolina  tribes. … A more crucial  and central  fact though, to  all  Lumbee people, is the belief in their Indianness above all  else.”

By the early 1700s, the Lumbee had established a closeknit community in Robeson and surrounding counties, inland in southeastern North Carolina, and adopting some of the ways of the English settlers, mostly coexisted peaceably with them through the colonial period. But that changed, Tharp  said, when “land-hungry whites” emboldened by President Andrew Jackson’s administration and its Indian Removal  Act of 1830, expunged Indian titles to land. Then in 1835, a change in North Carolina’s state Constitution, which previously made no restriction explicitly on the basis of race, mandated that “no free Negro, free mulatto or free person of mixed blood”  would  be allowed  to vote.

Thus deprived of their political and civil rights, the Lumbee assisted escaped Union prisoners  of war during the Civil War, and “the area exploded into a long-lived guerilla war,” known as the Lowry War, “that did not end with the Civil War,” but  lingered until the disappearance of Henry Berry Lowry, an outlaw and Lumbee folk hero, in 1872, said Tharp.

Turpentine connection

In the late 1800s, the Lumbee, or Croatan, established their own schools and churches. Some also carried forward the tribe’s long-established role working in the “naval stores” industry, extracting turpentine and rosin from pine trees.

When that industry shifted from the exhausted pine forests of North Carolina to other southeastern states, Croatan families moved with it, with the largest number coming to Georgia, Tharp said. So, in 1890 the aforementioned group migrated to Bulloch County. Some previous naval stores businesses were consolidated under the Adabelle Trading Company, which was also involved in cotton farming, and some of the Croatan families became tenant farmers as well. They built a church, which held a successful revival in 1909.

“By 1910, the Croatans had opened a school on the property of the Adabelle Trading Company,” Tharp noted. “The Robeson County newspaper reported that the school operated from six to seven months and offered a classical education, all supervised by Indian teachers from Robeson County.”

But after World War I, racial animosity fostered by the Ku Klux Klan in Bulloch County against the Croatan – previously exempted to some extent by keeping to themselves and being seen as neither black nor white – and the decline of the turpentine industry prompted a return of the Adabelle families to Robeson County. Nearly the entire community had left by 1920, Tharp observed.

“Today all that remains of the community in Bulloch County is the Croatan Cemetery in Adabelle, eight miles from Claxton,” he said.

On June 4, 1989, a group of Lumbees from Robeson County formally rededicated the cemetery in Adabelle, placing a stone monument, with the  Bulloch County Historical Society assisting. In 2022, the Lumbee group contracted a licensed mapper to identify unmarked graves, of which 53 were discovered in the cemetery, in addition to the six previously marked graves.  One grave is of a mother and child, so Tharp noted that a total of 60 individuals are known to be buried there.