The Sampson County History Museum is continuing its Distinguished Speaker Series with lessons about a conflict between the Colonial settlers and the natives of eastern North Carolina.
Dr. David La Verne, a professor of American Indian History, is presenting “Geography & the Tuscarora War.” It’s scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 27, at the Clinton City Hall Auditorium, 221 Lisbon St., Clinton. The event is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Sampson County History Museum Friends.
The presentation will feature details about a war lasting from 1711 to 1715. It started Sept. 22, 1711 when more than 500 hundred Tuscarora, Core, Neuse, Pamlico, Weetock, Machapunga, and Bear River Indian warriors attacked unsuspecting settlers living near the Neuse and Pamlico Rivers of North Carolina. It continued for several days with hundreds of farms and plantations destroyed. More than 100 people were killed by the warriors as well.
The Tuscarora War is considered to be the bloodiest Colonial war in North Carolina’s history. According to historians, the geography of the state started the war and brought it to a close as well. Additional information about the battles and how it shaped history in the Carolinas will be presented from La Verne’s book “The Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies,” published in 2013 by the University of North Carolina Press in Chapel Hill.
La Verne is a member of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington’s Department of History. He is an ethnohistorian and author of several books on American Indian History. Currently, he teaches and conducts research on Native Americans in the Southeast region of the United States, with a heavy concentration of the Carolinas. La Verne’s work also includes written work on the Southern Plains and Texas. He earned a bachelor’s from Northwestern State University in Louisiana before earning a masters from the same institution in 1989. La Verne later earned a doctorate from Texas A&M University in 1993.
The museum’s Distinguished Speaker Series began in 2019 with a goal to have presenters talk about history and interesting topics. The first speaker was Julie Hedgepeth Williams, a former reporter and editor for The Sampson Independent and author of “A Rare Titanic Family.” During her visit, she spoke about her great-uncle Albert Caldwell and his family surviving the 1912 tragedy when the ship hit an iceberg.
The second scheduled speaker was the late Abe Piasek, a Holocaust survivor who was once interviewed by Steven Spielberg for “Schindler’s List,” which is a part of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. He was also the recipient two presidential medals from President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.