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Has anyone seen anything on Fort Neherook?
It’s close to another name Neharoka or something close , the name is clearly of eastern siouan origins.
What was the name of the last stronghold of the Tuscarora? Wasn’t it named Fort N . . . something — something similar to the name you mention?
I might be wrong about that . . . 🙂
vance
Nope Vance you are right on the money, I looked at a map that in one of those state hisrtorical images and it had this fort but there is also a fort in Cherokee country fort neoheroka (sp) but the NC map showed this Nehrook, but no Christanna, strange but true .
One very interesting bit was that in 1733 there was a res. for remaining Tuscaroroa people.
Thanx for the reply.
I have never heard of a fort by that name in Cherokee lands — where did you find a reference to it? I have a yahoo group that researches Chickamauga history thouroughly. We’d love to hear more about it. Thanks.
vance
There are various spellings of Fort Neoherooka (my version of the spelling). I visited it once about three years ago. Our host and her ex-husband, Linda and Barry took me to see it when I dropped in on them. It’s in Greene County, NC, a few miles southeast of the town of Snow Hill, NC.
At that time, it was just a field of soy beans on private land. The site is next to a small branch of water that eventually empties into the Neuse River about 12 miles away.
Other than a highway marker, you’d never know it’s there. Personally, I think the state of NC or the federal government ought to purchase the land and preserve it as a national battlefield, just like Little Bighorn Battlefield National Park.
I knew that after the Tuscarora War of 1711 to 1713, reservation lands were set aside for the “friendly” Northern Tuscarora, but I have never been able to discover where the first reservation was, although I believe it was somewhere near Lake Mattamuskeet. However, the second reservation, established somewhat later, was Indian Woods, in Bertie County.
I have heard from some Lumbees who were hunting on the land that once formed the Indian Woods reservation that they met local folks who looked to be Indians. Probably descendants of some of the Tuscarora who never left the area.
http://tuscaroras.com/fortneoheroka/
The above link is to some pages I put together for a friend on the Tuscarora reservation in Lewiston, NY, who visited Fort Neoheroka at the time I lived nearby. What’s written is the information he gleaned from the archeologists there. Some of it is denied by them (mainly the info concerning the thermal imaging of a mass grave).
It’s quite a tragic story and the dig revealed some chilling details on that massacre. It was obvious to the archeologist that, because of the extensive tunnel system, the Tuscarora in that fort could have escaped the night before their slaughter. What he couldn’t escape was the sense that they remained because they thought they would have reinforcements, which, in the end, never came. The historical record does document one group distancing itself from the combatants. Resentments over this exist to this day.
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