Indian Woods: The Tuscarora's Last Reservation

About five miles northwest of here, the colonial government of North Carolina established the Indian Woods Reservation in seventeen seventeen for the Tuscarora people who remained in the state after the brutal Tuscarora War of seventeen eleven to seventeen thirteen. Chief Tom Blount and the Northern Tuscarora had sided with the colonists against the Southern Tuscarora faction, and in reward they received a tract of more than fifty thousand acres on the north side of the Roanoke River. For a century the reservation served as a homeland for those who stayed.

But colonial pressure and encroachment eroded the land base steadily, and in eighteen twenty-eight the reservation was sold and the Tuscarora presence in North Carolina effectively erased. Most of the nation had already relocated to New York, joining their Haudenosaunee relatives decades before.