Mattamuskeet Lake Native Americans and Settlers Draining the Lake Town of New Holland Transportation Wildlife Refuge The CCC Boys Famous Visitors   Mattamuskett Home       EEO Department of Biology College of Arts and Sciences East Carolina University     For additional information or comments about this website, contact Dr. Roger Rulifson © 2001

ECU Field Station for Coastal Studies at Mattamuskeet: History     Native Americans and Settlers The East Carolina University copy of the Moseley Map is the only known original print of this historic map currently extant in the United States. The Public Record Office in London and the Eton College Library have copies but they are both in poor condition. No other copies are known to exist. This copy, which disappeared from public view during the mid-nineteenth century, was donated to ECU by Mrs. John W. Graham of Edenton. It will hang permanently in the reading room of the East Carolina Manuscript Collection in J. Y. Joyner Library. Algonquian Indians, of the Secotan chiefdom, lived in the Albemarle-Pamlico region and hunted, fished, foraged, and tended gardens. The first Europeans to explore the lake area (1585) were from Sir Walter Raleigh's second Roanoke Island expedition. At the time, the Native Americans called the lake "Paquippe." At the end of the Tuscarora Indian War, the colonial government permitted the surviving coastal Indian tribes to live in the Lake Mattamuskeet area. In 1727, the Lord Proprietors of Carolina gave the "Indians of Mattamuskeet" a land grant of 10,240 acres lying "at Mattamuskeet on Pamplycoe sound." Deeds pertaining to the reservation lands also refer to the Indians and lake as "Arromuskeet." Edward Moseley was one of the men who witnessed the land grant document. It is not clear how or when the name of the lake became Mattamuskeet, but a map drawn by Moseley in 1733 identified the lake as Mattamuskeet and showed the general location of the Mattamuskeet Indian reservation. Mattamuskeet is an Indian word thought by linguists to mean "dry dust" or "a moving swamp." By 1761, the Mattamuskeet Indians had sold their reservation land to the colonists, assimilated into the white and black population of the region, or left the colony to join other Algonquian tribes. In the public records of Hyde County, the Mattamuskeet descendants were not referred to as Indians after 1804. They were generally grouped with the free blacks of Hyde County and designated "free persons of color." In the period between 1835 and 1865, it was common practice in Hyde County to place children of "free persons of color" in indentured apprenticeships, removing them from their families and their roots until they reached the age of 21. Whatever remnants of the Mattamuskeet Indian culture passed into the 19th century was largely destroyed by the apprenticeship practices.