HISTORY OVERVIEW - Part 2- The Coree and Tuscarora Wars

John White drawing

The first few brave settlers, in what would become Carteret County, may have encountered a few Coranine or Coree Indians, a small tribe that had occupied the coastline south of the Neuse River. According to Al Pate in The Coree Are Not Extinct, the Coree, about five years earlier, had already begun to roam the coast “from the New River of Onslow…to Core Point and into their old homeland on the Pamlico south shore of Coree Tuck.”

Although the earliest settlers, Shackelford, Piver, Nelson and others, were relatively safe in their isolation in the Core Sound area, the circumstances of the time were not conducive to more settlement. For several years those south of the Albemarle and north of the Neuse River faced a period of not only political strife but conflict with the lower Tuscarora and Coree Indians. 

Al Pate described his Coree ancestors as a proud people who refused to return friendship “with every beating they took.” Pate wrote, “The Coree War is the Indian war that’s in the records, that history ignored and historians forgot.” The Coree War described by Pate as “a canoe warfare and pitiful delaying action,” started about eight years before the Tuscarora War and lasted another two years after the Tuscarora headed north. 

The Tuscarora, outraged over enslavement, land encroachment and the deceitful practices of the white intruders, were angered at being pushed off their land--the area of present-day New Bern. King Hancock and his braves, full of resentment and hatred, murdered Deputy Surveyor John Lawson and decided to declare war. In September of 1711, according to historian William Powell, King Hancock's warriors, joined by other tribes, including the Coree, "launched an all-out attack along the Neuse and Pamlico, including the town of Bath." The unsuspecting and untrained colonists, also weak from a poor drought-caused harvest, were stunned and frightened. Farnifold Green and others made out their wills.

In 1712 Governor Thomas Pollock appointed Farnifold Green to help supply the army in Bath County and to garrison a small militia in the Core Sound area. Two years later Green’s 1700-acre Neuse River plantation at Greens Creek was the site of a brutal massacre that ended in the death of forty-year-old Farnifold Green. According to a family historian, also killed were “his son Thomas, a white servant and two Negroes. Another son was shot through the shoulder but managed to escape.”  

With help from Colonel John “Tuscarora Jack” Barnwell, Colonel James Moore and their South Carolina troops, including Indians from other tribes, the Tuscarora were finally defeated at Nooherooka in early 1713. The majority of the Tuscarora survivors migrated north and became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Coree, as noted by Pate, “grunted at the signing…and hunkered down in their hideaways, deep in the swamps…while their menfolk harried the Albemarle, the women and children of the Corees made their way to rich dry hammocks between the pocosins."

The continuation of the Coree War went on until February 11, 1715, when the colonial government finally returned “a piece of old Pamtico” to the few remaining Coree. However, with names like Core Banks and Core Sound, the Coree left their mark on land south of the Neuse.