Totero Town

Thanks for that link! It says —

http://www.salemmuseum.org/guide_archives/HSV3N1.html#Digs

Guide to Historic Salem — Volume 3, Number 1 — Spring 1997

“Walter Biggs Remembered: Artist Was Story Teller” by Richard Persinger

“Digs Reveal Indian Village” By Delores L. Mitchell

“A Village Green?” An Editorial by Lon Savage

“Civil War Speaker Dresses the Part”

Community Calendar of Events–Spring, Summer 1997

Digs Reveal Indian Village

by Delores L. Mitchell

Picture in your mind a large, open field, nestled against the Roanoke River and near the present city of Salem. Many trees once grew there, but they have been cut down to make a large clearing. Around the clearing, homes have been built. Families are cooking outdoors, and the smell of the smoke from the fires mingles with the odor of the food. The day is bright and sunny, and children and animals are running, dancing and playing in the middle of the field. Sounds of dogs barking and children laughing fill the air.

Is this a scene in a modern suburb of Salem in 1997? No, it is a fictional account of what might have been happening in the year 1667, when an Indian village is known to have occupied the land on the banks of the Roanoke River where the Moyer Sports Complex now stands.

In 1970, some amateur archeologists discovered Indian artifacts on the surface of the land where the Moyer Sports Complex was to be built. Twenty-two acres, known as the “Graham-White site,” had been donated to Salem to build a ballpark for children. When city officials heard of the Indian find, they allowed part of the land, one fourth of it, to be excavated before building began. According to Tom Klatka, an archeologist with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, “The Graham-White site is one of the most significant Indian sites discovered in western Virginia.”

From the digging that resulted, archeologists have been able to piece together a considerable amount of information about the Indians who once lived on the sports complex land.

The Native Americans apparently had wampum — not exactly money, but “an exchange medium,” Klatka said — made from shells and glass. They had tools – the adze for cutting wood in building houses and dugout canoes, hammer stones used in pounding stakes, axes, cutting tools like knives, scrapers for working with hides, and a variety of others. They had bows and arrows. They had drinking vessels and pots. They smoked pipes; and they dug holes where they stored trash and other materials that tell of their lives.

Excavations at the Graham-White site produced all of these objects: arrowheads made from local flint, some of them serrated for added effectiveness; beads made of glass and shells, clay pipes used for ceremonial purposes,and more than 120 large holes, dug deep into the ground. The diggers also found pieces of pots and drinking vessels, including one which Ferri Lockhart, a teacher at Mason’s Cove Elementary school, put together from about 30 fragments she found in an excavation at the sports complex. It is now in the Salem Museum — the only complete Indian pot found in the Roanoke Valley. The museum’s collection includes other artifacts from the Moyer Complex digs.

The Native Americans of that time made their houses, or wigwams, from slender saplings which they drove into the ground in a circular or oval pattern, then bent them toward the center and tied the ends together, forming the framework of round-topped huts which they covered with hides or fiber mats. The covering of the homes was largely waterproof, Klatka said, usually with a hole at the top to allow smoke to rise from fires built inside for warmth and cooking. Although there are no remnants of them, such homes probably were the kind the Indians occupied in what is now Salem.

Indians usually occupied their villages for only 20 to 30 years, Klatka said; then they moved elsewhere in the general area, frequently up or down the stream, to find new land, new sources of firewood and food. There they would erect another village. Another Indian village site has been found and partially excavated upstream from the Graham-White site near the industrial park and Mill Lane in Salem. Artifacts and other evidence indicate strongly that the same people occupied both villages, Klatka said.

Klatka says that Indians liked to set up their camps on flatlands, near water, where they could fish and water their crops of maize and beans. Near the Roanoke River, they found a flat apron of fertile soil awaiting only the clearing to provide home sites and to bear sustaining crops. The streams were running with fish and the forest teeming with wild animals and birds.

There is archeological evidence of Indian activity in the Roanoke Valley from 8000 BC until the mid-18th century. It is also known that in 1671, Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam led an expedition to explore Virginia. They told of a three-day visit in a Native American village called “Totera Town,” occupied by the Tutelo Indians. It was described in Fallam’s journal as “a very rich swamp between the branch and the main River of Roanoke circled about the mountains.”: He also noted that the men were “exceedingly civilly entertained” by the Tutelo tribe.

It is possible, Klatka believes, that this was the village on the land where Moyer Sports Complex now stands. “We know the village [at what is now the Moyer Complex] was occupied when Batts and Fallam came through,” he said, and “Totera Town” was believed to have been located near the Roanoke River in the vicinity of what is now Salem. But there is no proof, of course.

Contact with Europeans changed Indian lives. In addition to introducing the native population to European ways, colonists also brought with them diseases, such as small pox and influenza, which killed a significant population of Indians. Information developed in the Carolinas indicates that large numbers of the Native Americans in the eastern mountains died in the decade 1690-1700. Those who survived often joined other tribes. It is believed that many surviving Tutelos eventually migrated northward and ended up on reservations in Canada, with Indians from the Iroquois nation and other tribes. By the early to mid 1700s, few Native American tribes remained in the region.

When officials of the city of Salem learned of the historical value of the Graham-White site, they were very cooperative with the archeologists. They made adjustments to the plans for the Moyer Sports Complex and postponed building for some time to allow the digging to continue. According to Klatka, it was a learning process for both the city and the archeologists.

Today the Moyer Sports Complex stands were Indian children once played and danced. The building of the complex will preserve the land which is important to the archeologists. What better use could be found for this spot than to have the children of the 21st century play ball, climb ladders, swing on swings and cook and picnic outdoors just as their ancestors did some 300 years ago?

http://www.salemmuseum.org/guide_archives/HSV8N1.html

There is another article in this journal about Tutera Town, at the above link.

Guide to Historical Salem – Volume 8, Number 1 — Winter 2001-2002

Will Freed Slaves if They Emigrated to African Nation

School Began With Humble Origins In 1842

Stately Fort Lewis Mansion burned in 1949

Salem’s Beginnnings Shrouded by Some Mysterious Questions

First Inhabitants of Salem Left Few Clues of their Lives

Salem Early Waystation for Travelers

Who Was James Simpson

Exploring the Roots of Salem’s Elusive Founder

Read the article called “First Inhabitants of Salem Left Few Clues of their Lives”

Here are excerpts —

. . .

Like most eastern Native Americans, the Woodland people here lived in houses made of bent saplings covered in hides, bark, clay or thatch. Most houses were round or oblong in shape with one entrance and an opening in the top for smoke from a central fire. English neighbors called these structures “wigwams” from the Monacan word wigawa.

. . .

Many scholars believe that the first contact between the resident people of the valley and Europeans was through a group of English explorers led by Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam in September 1671. Governor William Berkeley commissioned these men to follow the Roanoke River and cross the mountains in search of the Pacific. At this time the British did not know the full breadth of the North American continent.

The explorers kept a journal describing their journey. Within a few days they reached a broad valley with rolling hills. After descending a steep slope they came upon a palisaded village which they named Totera Town. The journal records that they were “exceedingly well entertained” by the Totera or Tutelo people before venturing westward in search of the Western Sea. The expedition traveled for some days before reaching the New River. Seeing the seemingly endless chain of mountains stretching west they admitted defeat and followed their path back home.

Although Batts and Fallam were the first men to record their encounter with the Totera, they most probably were not the first Europeans to venture into the Salem area. There is some speculation that Spanish explorers may have ventured into the valley well before, for Batts and Fallam had found several trees marked with the words “A.MANI” and “MANI”. There is no definite answer for who may have carved this.

Many archeologists and historians argue that Totera town was located where the Moyer Sports complex in Salem is today. Others feel it may have been at the confluence of Masons Creek and the Roanoke River. Still others insist it is lost forever to development and all we have left is speculation.

The 18th Century brought great changes to the Totera people and their local cousins, the Saponi. Diseases such as smallpox and measles arrived for which they had no natural immunities. The Native Americans also had a low tolerance for and high degree of addiction to the strong liquor traded by the British. Firearms soon replaced the traditional hunting weapons and the population of white tail deer, an important food source, dropped rapidly as the Europeans paid handsomely for deer hides.

The century also included increased warfare from other, more powerful tribes. By 1720, the Totera and Saponi had been forced south to live with the Tuscarora people in North Carolina. Within a few years the remnants of all three tribes had moved to upstate New York where they ultimately allied themselves with the Iroquois.

As the years progressed so did European expansion. By the 1750’s The area was being settled and traveled by folks moving south from the Shenandoah Valley. Written accounts of those years describe a well-watered valley with rich soil, flowing springs salty bogs and open meadows. A brief fifty years before those meadows may have been the cornfields and village sites of the Totera.

vance

Lynella, my computer is back and running fine.

There is a point in time where my surnames just can’t be found anymore. They go back a while and dissapear. For instance Nevil Wayland was born @ 1754, yet we know nothing abouyt where he was born or where he was until about the late 1770s or the 1780s when he appears in South Carolina as a “wagoner on the Indian frontier” during the Revolutionary War.

Knowing the Indian communities east of the Appalachians disentigrated pretty much between about 1700 to 1750 may explain this, or it is one possible explanation among many. Can it be proven that my ancestor was one of these displaced people? — probably not. It is just an atempt to accumulate circumstantial evidence. That might be all that is possible. In the absense of proof one way or another, in a court of law if you accumulate enough circumstantial evidence, you can win your case. This is why dates and names and locations are so important. It might be the only record we can find as names of most Indians might simply not exist.

I say this using my family as anexample, but many of us are in this same boat, with untraceable ancestors before a certain date. Knowing history might help us determine why that is.

vance

🙂 Vance:) ,

Exactly! I am in that same boat there with some of our people. Won’t give up the hunt any time soon. But yes, you are really getting me to see the light about history. I truly am sorry now that it was one of my worst subjects in school. I just wouln’t apply my brain to it. Now I’m diggin’ it though, thanks to you and Brenda and everyone else. You’re the best! I’m glad your computer is up & running again. Now we can get chatty more often. When you go on this field trip you’re planning I want to hear all about it! I’m excited! And Drive careful. Love Ya’, Lynella.