Square Pegs

 

One hundred and thirty years ago, this disturbing article appeared in a small-town North Carolina newspaper. It is, by any observation of its many facets, an historically accurate tomb. We cannot read it from a position of presentism. It is requisite to consider it from the era it was written in. Mores and ethics have evolved, yet history itself does not change, only our perception of it. So, as I dissect it for the information it holds, do not read it with retrojection. Read it for the knowledge they had of the multi-racial communities that lived among them, and how those communities had developed over time to begin with, the 'square pegs', the individuals who did not fit comfortably in any category.

The News Reporter

Littleton, North Carolina · Friday, November 12, 1897

An ethnologist is a cultural anthropologist who compares data between societies to discover their differences, commonalities and patterns within the culture of the human animal. Bill Ayre, a writer for The Washington Post, wrote the article below, based on the experiences and perceptions of his acquaintance, a Dr. Peterson, Ethnologist from St. Louis, Missouri, gleaned from a conservation, or interview with the 'Scientist'. I wrap that word thusly, as he would not be considered such in 2026.

Dr. Peterson was, at this time in 1897, a government employee. His due was to examine mounds built by Indigenous tribes in the past, that cover most of the continental 48 states, mostly the southeastern part of the country, in which I currently live. He was also tasked with writing a history of what was known as the Five Civilized Tribes, namely, The Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole. These five had kept their national identities, national rereferring to the 'Indian Nation's', not the nation of the USA. Most had succumbed to the pressure to enter into treaties confining their dwindling numbers to reservations to preserve their remaining culture and basic existence. 

Harshly, the conversation had dived into the actions of Hernando DeSoto, the explorer, and his men, and with salacious misogyny, their abuse and enslavement of the indigenous women as "he overran this country and took captive as many Indian girls as his men wanted."

After that the men wondered why the tribes, who greatly outnumbered the Spanish explorers, not attack and stop the invading force? The answer came honestly, "Because they were paralyzed with fear of this new and aggressive race of people."  I would liken it to the effect if a spaceship loaded with advanced technology and beings who look somewhat different than ourselves would land in our midst tomorrow. We'd all be in a bit of shock and awe, wouldn't we? The Europeans looked similar, but different, as humans, dressed in fabrics of which the ingenious people had never seen, with weapons that they could not imagine, and in a vessel the likes of nothing they had ever encountered. It must have been overwhelming.

Of most interest to me, it was reported that the doctor had been in the eastern part of this state, "investigating the tribe of 4000 Croatans over there." I have learned over the past dozen or more years that the term Croatan, which began with the original coastal tribe, referred to an amalgamation of remnant North Carolina tribes, combined together, who had attempted to culturate and assimilate with the colonists, instead of avoiding them. They have finally, in the past few years, gained federal recognition as a tribe. We know them primarily as Lumbee. 

He went on to recount the tale of the Lost Colony, Governor White and Virginia Dare, the first English child to be born in America. An important statement by the doctor was that Sir Walter Raleigh and planted a colony, 300 years prior, of English and Portuguese, on Roanoke Island. The implication was that the colony was not lost but had taken refuge with the Croatan from the elements and other tribes when Governor White had been delayed by the Spanish in his return with supplies. Over the decades, they had become, those who survived, part of the tribe. 

The article continues by declaring that they had not been "Americanized" until the mid-19th Century and the onset of the Civil War, when several of them willingly joined the Confederate Army.

During the years of the War, an election was held in the county (Robeson) in which they lived, and one candidate asked for the support of these men who were serving in the Army and the local militia, freeborn men of that area, whose ancestors predated those of European decent by millennia. Vote, they did, and the opposing candidate pitched a hissy fit, as grandma would say, upon the grounds that he claimed they had 'some' African ancestry, along with indigenous. The soldiers were, of course, 'indignant', and proclaimed that when their European-descended neighbors wanted them to fight for them, they were considered equals, but when it came to their vote, they were given the same status as the enslaved. A committee of four doctors was assembled and tasked with examining the men physically, in order to categorize them into one box or the other.

These laughable experts took the men to a sandy area and had them walk barefoot in order to make tracks. "Five of them made very fair Anglo-Saxon tracks and were accepted, but of the other two the report was that their feet made holes in the ground, and they were rejected."

Now, I have personally never heard of footprints being an indicator of race, but apparently, they were in the books of these primitive anthropologists.

A mention was then made of Croatans living on Newman's Ridge in Tennessee. It is now known that this group and those surrounding them were known as Melungeon, whether is a designation or pejorative label. He then retold a story of a train ride in Tennessee that he went on where he had encountered a man who claimed to have been of mixed black and Portuguese heritage.

A man named Sanford didn't know what to do with the man, or in other words, which round hole, or group, to place him with. The decision was made to let him be, and the writer was later told the man was a Croatan.

The conversation then turned to the subject of the lands out west, that were of that date still territories. It was stated that the Dawes Commission, which had been created to negotiate the end of communal ownership of lands among the Five Civilized Tribes, in hopes that some would choose to part with even more land to settlers, for the money, rather than keeping it within the tribe. "The Choctaws will get 700 acres each, and a family of ten will therefore have 7000 acres and will be tempted to sell most of it."

They added the fact that pureblood Native Americans wanted to keep lands for the tribe as a whole, but those of mixed ancestry, (white and Native, black and Native, or tri-racial), which were the majority of the group, wanted to divide the property by family and sell some off for the cash, with no real concern for future generations. 

 

The ethnologist sadly predicted that greed would take over and that, "in a few years he Indian's autonomy will be gone forever, and he will be extinguished as a ward of the nation", and that their identity and land would be "absorbed in the mottled masses of American humanity. He even mourned the loss of what he considered a 'proud, rich and happy' race. His predictions have not, now 131 years later, not come to fruition. Tribes still maintain their autonomy and identity, while the numbers of purebloods still dwindle. Many remain in poverty on their lands but still own their lands. Other tribes are bringing old treaties to court and while no one has run current residents off land that had been swindled away a century or more ago, municipalities, and corporations, are being made to give up monetary compensations. 

A mention was made of railroads, who would and did use eminent domain to take the lands of not only the Five tribes, but farmers, ranchers and other western tribes. That didn't, however, cause their disappearance. It was heart-warming to see the reaction of Dr. Peterson, who had by then had spent a copious amount of time among the various tribes, and mixed-race communities. Enraged, he observed, "This nation is a nation of robbers, and it is and always has been a maxim of Anglo-Saxon people.". 

It seems that Dr. Peterson was an educated man, educated by experience that projected his observations beyond his place in time.

He continued, "That they may take who have the power. And they may keep who can."

Bill Arp concluded his article with the story of a powder horn and likened it to the bow and arrow in its obsoleting. 

People of multiple races are increasing in number with each generation and have always been among us from the time the Spanish conquerors took as "many Indian girls" as they wanted. 

Native American DNA

A tired old family rumor in many families of European or African origin is that of the Indian Princess ancestor. I've looked in many a family tree over the years for people who heard that rumor all of their lives. Enter Elizabeth Warren and these so-called rumors are on the forefront.

I even started a research project called "The Indians of Stanly County" wherein I looked at different families, a few from just the rumor, but several who have "dark genes", coloration that belies more than European origins. White people will usually tell you they are Cherokee. I think because its just the name of a tribe they had heard of. Black people will say that they are Blackfoot. Probably just because of the word "black". Not long ago I got into a bit of a disagreement with a couple of girls on Facebook. Both white, one was claiming to be of Cherokee descent, the other Sioux. Being from the Carolina Piedmont, both these scenarios are highly unlikely. I tried to explain to them that people years ago, including Native Americans, migrated west not east. It was unlikely that a Cherokee in the past several decades came east to the Uwharries to end up in someone's family tree, but not impossible, that I will admit. But the Sioux??? They were from the Midwest, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin maybe, but NOT North Carolina. I looked into their family trees, and just as I thought, they were both descended from the Dutch Creek Germans and the Pee Dee River UK derived Baptists and the Scots who came up the Cumberland into Chatham and Moore Counties and on into Montgomery and Stanly. No trace of Native American heritage. If there was any, say, prior to 1740 or so, it had all washed out. The "my Grandmother was Cherokee" did not pan out. Your grandmother was probably 25 percent Scotch-Irish, about 50 percent German Lutheran and 25 percent English who had originally settled along the James River.

I did find however, while looking at living families who have brown skin, most had an actual traceable Native American origin. But it was not Cherokee. They led to not-well-known Native American tribes from the East Coast of North Carolina, Southern Virginia or from the North/South Carolina border.

When Stanly County was formed in 1841, there were several families labeled "Free People of Color", listed as mulatto's, who were not of European or African origins, but were actually families who had migrated into the Piedmont from their origins in Counties east. They may have been of mixed ancestry, but their primary identity was that of "Indian" with a few making claims to "Portugee" or Portuguese origins. These brown-skinned families held the names of Bell, Hedgespeth, Fowler and Bass, among others. These names are common among the Haliwa-Saponi, Lumbee, Waccamaw, Tuscarora, Nansemond and other small tribes today.

One family I traced back to Cheraw and Marlboro counties in South Carolina through one grandmother. Cheraw County was named for the Cheraw tribe. The Cheraw were known to have owned the land that became the theme park called Carowinds, just south of Charlotte.





The original territory of the Cheraw is shown above. There are several families of the surname Chavis, this family's grandmother's maiden name, still living in small neighborhoods in these counties.

A few of the families were Lumbee. The Lumbee are actually the largest tribe east of the Mississippi. Robeson County is their main county of origin with Scotland coming in a close second, but they are actually scattered all over North and South Carolina these days.

I did find one family, the Chandlers, who had a son who had migrated from their family home on the Davidson/Montgomery County line, up to the N. C. mountains where he married a girl who was indeed, Cherokee, and brought her home. This line of the Chandlers ended up in Albemarle in Stanly County and all of the older members of the family definitely showed the genetics from their Cherokee ancestor.

But most of the families I researched, I could find no hint of a Native American ancestor at all.

One curious link I found was that some of the families I researched with "dark" genes had one ancestor in common, William Riley Morton.

A few others also had a common ancestor named David Blalock.

While other people all had a story about their Indian Princess grandmother, I have quite the opposite problem. My DNA showed Native American heritage, and I did not know where it came from.

Below is the results of from my DNA test uploaded to gedmatch.com. It shows I carry a percentage of Native American DNA on nearly every one of my 22 chromosomes.

Amerindian

3.0%

5.4%

-

2.1%

3.0%

-

2.0%

-

-

1.9%

-

-

3.4%

1.3%

1.5%

1.8%

4.5%

-

7.0%

-

0.3%

1.7%

Well that didn't copy well. To size it up, there are 22 pairs of chromosomes. I don't have any Native American ancestry in my near ancestors. It's distant, at least 4 or more generations back. What I do have is Native American DNA on 14 of my 22 pairs of Chromosomes or 63 percent, two-thirds of them. This seems to indicate Native American ancestry from multiple distant sources on both sides of my family.

This is the data that I tried to copy:

CH 1         CH2      CH 3     CH4   CH5   CH6   CH7   CH8   CH9   CH10   CH11
3.0             5.4           0          2.1      3.0      0        2.0       0         0        1.8        0

CH12      CH 13   CH14   CH15   CH16   CH 17   CH 18 CH 19 CH 20 CH21 CH22
0               3.4          1.3       1.5       1.8       4.5         0             7       0          3         1.7

So my biggest chunks appear to be on CH 19, CH 2 and CH 17. I don't know how scientific this is, but it would seem to me that I could go to DNA painter and see who, what families, I share DNA with on these Chromosomes. Well, that was no help, because guess what? Both sides and multiple families appear on each chromosome. As I can't detect which particular segments, starting point or ending point these particular segments of DNA are located in, DNA painter can't help me much in this aspect.

On the pie chart, it's a little easier to see as the dark blue pie wedge. That shows my 12.5 percent Native American ancestry. I have brown eyes and brown hair, but I am as pale as the 80 + percent of my ancestry would indicate.

For years I traced down a rumored Native American lineage on my mother's side of the family tree. Several years ago I came across a history of the Aldridge Family, written and researched by Pam Wilson.

Pam Wilson, Aldridge Family

In it, there was the linage of one Caleb Aldridge, of whom I am a descendant, down not one, but two different paths. Caleb Aldridge had a son named Caleb Aldridge Jr. Junior had two sons, the oldest being Henry Garner Aldridge. Garner had married a lady named Priscilla Murray, aka Prussia or Prucey. She was one of the younger daughters of Jesse Murray, who first shows up in Anson County and then crosses the Rocky River into what is now Stanly County and made his home on a ridge above Long Creek close to its junction with the Rocky River and there he remains. The Murray graveyard still exists in the middle of a cornfield and sometime more recently, perhaps 80 years after his death, two of his grandsons erected a monument in it to replace the fading fieldstone markers, one that has withstood the passage of time.

In the Aldridge family history was the statement that Priscilla Murray was rumored to be an Indian. There was no indication in the census records that she was. Only that she had had a mixed race child after the death of her husband, Garner. Another odd thing was that she had one sister, Mariah, who had had 7 children by Henry Wilkerson, a slave of neighbor James Wilkerson. This was not typical behavior of proper ladies of typical Caucasian birth, not in the 19th century. Could there have been some truth to the fact that they were in fact, not white, or not All white, themselves?

I traced Jesse Murray back to Chatham and Orange Counties. Chatham was formed from Orange County in 1771. His mother, Jane, left a will. There were two men in the area who could have been his father, Benjamin and Duncan. They were most likely brothers and sons of  James. There is so little to go on. Benjamin is the most likely candidate due to naming patterns. Jesse had a son named Benjamin and several grandsons and great grandsons named Benjamin. Not one Duncan, not even as  middle name.

I managed to trace this line of Murray's back to Brunswick County, Virginia. Several books and records refer to James Murray of Brunswick County.

Virginia Cousins: A Study of the Ancestry and Posterity of John Goode of ...

By George Brown Goode

In the above book, I found the following paragraph as a side note:

*The Murray, Knox and Gordon Families-James Murray was a native of Scotland and of the lineage of William Murray, Lord Mansfield, the celebrated English jurist: he perpetuated the name of the ancestral seat in Scotland in that of his house, "Athol" near Petersburg. He married Anne Boling, a great granddaughter of Pocahantas."

So there is one link to Native American ancestry, very, very many generations ago, however and not my only link back to Pocahantas. For a girl who had but one child, she had a great many descendants. Both my Davis and Win(g)field lines lead back to Jamestown and in both lines is the family name "Warren" and this Warren family also leads back to Pocahantas. Could be that Presidential candidate, Elizabeth Warren, with her family rumours of Native American ancestry, is a descendant of Pocahantas. But it is so far back, would any of it show? However, if you had at least 3 lines back to Pocahantas, that kind of triples the odds of carrying at least a segment of her DNA, doesn't it?

But back to Jesse. Jesse Murray married Elizabeth Bass in Orange County. While others believe she is the daughter of a Richard Bass of Wayne County, I am not so sure.

The only other Bass that I have found in Stanly County during that time was a Mary Bass otherwise known as Polly.

In the Stanly County deeds, I find in Book 1 Page 188 dated December 19,1842 where Mary Bass and Richard Hedgepeth sold to Lewis J. McSwain, for $37 12 and half cents, a tract of land on Ugly Creek of about 49 and half acres in size, including one half of a spring, for the use of him and his family only.

It was signed with an X by both Mary Bass and Richard Hedsgepeth, witnessed by William H. Randle and recorded on February 25th, 1844 by my ancestor, Samuel P. Morton, registrar.

The county was still part of Montgomery when they acquired it. Montgomery County does not have online access to older deeds, only recent ones between the 1990's and now. At this time, due to stay at home orders and lockdowns of nonessential business and no public access to Civic buildings, I have no access to old Montgomery County deeds to see if there are any in there for Mary Bass.

In the early court records, she is referred to as Polly Bass, and her name is mentioned several times. She seems to have had difficulty paying bills and taxes. In 1841, 40 acres of her land on Ugly Creek was sold for taxes of 26 cents. Right next to her name is that of Richard Hedspeth who had 200 acres of Ugly Creek sold for back taxes of $2.75.

On August 14,  1843, her name is again in a list of delinquent taxpayers, and it listed that she owned 40 acres with 24 acres being sold. Her taxes were .80 cents and bin on by E. L. Parker.

Agan is 1856, her taxes were delinquent and her 40 acres were up for bid. The tax was .60 cents. In May of 1857, the 40 acres were ordered to be sold. In August of 1847, 19 of those acres were up for bid for the .60 cents and again was bided on by E. L. Parker.

Name:	Mary Bass
Gender:	Female
Age:	60
Birth Year:	abt 1790
Birthplace:	North Carolina
Home in 1850:	Centre, Stanly, North Carolina, USA
Cannot Read, Write:	Y
Line Number:	31
Dwelling Number:	75
Family Number:	76
Household Members:	Name Age Richard Hedgepeth 31 Lucy Hedgepeth 25 John Hedgepeth 8 Crowell Hedgepeth 6 Atlas Hedgepeth 3 Elizabeth Hedgepeth 1 Mary Hedgepeth 48 Mary Bass 60

The 1850 census shows Mary Bass as being 60 years old, which gives her an estimated birth year of about 1790. She is living in the home of Richard Hedspeth and his wife Lucy, their children and a Mary Hedspeth age 38. I wonder what the relationship between Mary Bass and the Hedspeth family was?  They lived together and owned property separately and together.

Another interesting thing about this census is that all the Hedgpeth's are listed as being mulatto, or not white or black. Mary Bass is not, her race is blank, along with most of the other people on the page, who were known to be white. They lived next to a Merritt Blalock and just up the page is an Elizabeth Blalock. In her household are two children, 11-year-old John Jackson and 10-year-old Melissa Blalock, who are also listed as being mulatto, while Ms. Blalock was white.

The full page from the 1850 document shows Merritt Blalock listed after the Hedgepeth family, Caswell Cooper above, Elizabeth Blalock, with Mary Blalock and the two mulatto children next, the Miller Easley family above them and Davidson Fowler and his wife, Nancy, another mulatto family, above them.

An old cemetery record shows that Elizabeth was Elizabeth Swaringen Blalock, who would die young just a few months after this census.

The Hudson family also lived along Ugly Creek, and above are the oldest entries in their cemetery.

In the November 1853 Session of Court, in Stanly County, NC, a David Blalock was appointed administrator of the estate of both a different David Blalock and Mary Blalock, simultaneously. William Swaringen served as his security in both instances. 

I looked for any other individuals this could have been, and there was no other Mary Blalocks who were alive in 1850, and not in 1860, except for a Mary Staton Blalock, born about 1780, whom everyone has dying in Mitchell County, NC.  This was the young Mary, who would have been about 26. Unless all those people have it horribly wrong, which I would not doubt. The Blalock's are a can of worms I am not prepared to open. I wondered what happened to the children? 

It is my belief that they went to Tennessee with the Merritt Blaylock, listed at the bottom of the page. He was a son of one of the David Blalocks, of which there were several. There was also another, younger, Merritt Blalock who did not go to Tennessee, so I can see where all of these individuals can be confusing. There, they mix into the diaspora of the mountain melee with a number of other Piedmont Carolinians and come in contact with the indefinable mountain people already there. Not only the Blalock's, but the Richardson Creek Yarborough/Hudson family of Anson/Union County, the Pleasant Almond family who stayed after their father returned to Stanly County after leaving their mother, Rebecca Lambert Almond, who was my aunt of a number of generations back. Add to that mix a branch of the Chandler family who may have connection to the current Chandler family of Stanly/Montgomery and Davidson Counties and the connections grow not just conceivable but concrete. They are our cousins. They are us and we are them. 

*This post was a draft began about 5 years ago. I want to complete many of them, and delete others, I am sure. This one is pertinent to what I am currently working on, so I've presented it here.