by Nicolette L. Cagle, Ph.D., October 23, 2026
With gratitude for the support of the Office of the Duke Forest, the sustained work of Sara Childs and Maggie Heraty, and the collaborative research of the Unearthing Duke Forest project team.
We notice the trees and the creek. We notice a stone wall or a depression in the earth. We give a place a name, and the name becomes the beginning. Robson Mill. Duke Forest. Orange County. North Carolina. America. But the histories of this land began long before those names.
In May 2022, I joined a group along New Hope Creek to learn about an archaeological excavation led by researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was spring, with pawpaw and spicebush in bloom, the northern parulas and yellow-throated warblers calling in the riparian woods.
In the wall of a precise and deep excavation pit, layers of soil compounded evidence of cultivation and flooding. Beneath the plowed ground and deposited sediments was a dark, buried soil horizon. Archaeologist R. P. Stephen “Steve” Davis Jr. described it as an older ground surface, a place where Indigenous people had walked. I could see the layers. I could see how the ground beneath the forest had changed, how the history of people and the history of the land were held together in the soil.
Soil layers exposed during the 2022 archaeological field school along New Hope Creek. During our visit, Steve Davis interpreted the buried dark horizon as a former ground surface. Photograph and annotations from my May 25, 2022 field notes.
For over a decade, I have worked with Sara Childs, Maggie Heraty, and others to add to the histories of the William Robson homesite and mill compiled by Stuart Dunaway and shared by Dr. Norm Christensen. The site lies along New Hope Creek in what is now Duke Forest, in Orange County, North Carolina. My recent research has brought new names into view and strengthened some connections, while reminding me how much remains unknown.
This is the first in a series about those histories. Before turning to the mill, I want to begin with people whose relationships with this land preceded the deeds, and continue after the deeds. I want to note that I am sharing information from communities that are not my own, and I do so in the spirit of acknowledgement of overlapping histories, and with the goal of relationship and reciprocity.
This understanding has grown through conversations with Indigenous elders and community members, archaeological research, and historical accounts, but any errors are my own. Those who have generously shared their knowledge with me include Occaneechi elder Johnny “Blackfeather” Jeffries, Vickie Jeffries, and Beverly Scarlett. Their contributions, and a recent conversation with Beverly Scarlett, remind us that Indigenous history is long, fluid, and living. It cannot be reduced to one settlement on a map or confined to a time before Europeans arrived.
Those living histories also fill the pages of Ribbons of Color Along the Eno River, a series published by the Eno River Association and rooted in Beverly Scarlett’s family-history research and the contributions of community members. In an interview recorded by Joe Liles, Johnny “Blackfeather” Jeffries remembers fishing with his grandfather and uncles along the Eno, carrying fishing poles made from cedar saplings, and growing up within sight of the mountain now called Occoneechee. “I always knew I was Indian,” he says. His account holds childhood memories alongside the work of securing state recognition for the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. It reminds me that the histories of this region persist in families as well as in soil, and that Indigenous people continue to tell those histories in their own words.
Written accounts offer additional threads, often frayed by bias or ignorance, but threads nevertheless. Describing his 1701 journey through the Carolinas, John Lawson recorded a village called Adshusheer, inhabited by Eno, Adshusheer, and Shakori people. Davis believed that the village was likely located along New Hope Creek, south of the Robson Mill site. He shared that interpretation with us during our May 2022 visit.
The investigation drew on knowledge shared across generations and communities. Occaneechi historian Forest Hazel had supplied Davis with an 1870 newspaper account describing a flood along New Hope Creek and evidence of an Indigenous settlement. I located additional newspaper accounts. Descriptions of the creek and its rock formations offered clues that Davis, fellow archaeologist Heather Lapham, and their colleagues could compare with the landscape.
The excavation yielded pottery sherds, small stone points, and a fragment of a ceramic pipe. Someone had shaped that clay. Someone had worked that stone. The fragments invite us to consider the skill, attention, and daily lives of people whose names we do not have.
A ceramic pipe fragment at left, pottery sherds in the center, and small stone points at right, recovered during UNC’s 2022 archaeological field school along New Hope Creek. These objects document Indigenous presence along the creek; they do not establish that the excavated site was Adshusheer. Source: Maggie Heraty’s notes from the December 12, 2022, visit to UNC’s Research Laboratories of Archaeology.
They also require care in interpretation. During a December 2022 visit to UNC’s Research Laboratories of Archaeology, Maggie recorded a preliminary date range of the 1400s–1600s for the ceramics, with further analysis needed. No glass trade beads had been found at that time. The materials document Indigenous presence along the creek, but they do not establish that this was the village Lawson called Adshusheer.
Davis described Adshusheer as a place where communities had come together for refuge and protection under the pressures of colonialism. He also described connections between these peoples and the Catawba Nation. Beverly Scarlett has emphasized the movement of peoples through this region, including the possibility that Tuscarora people traveled through and at times settled here. The histories we are trying to understand include movement and relationship, as well as the devastating displacement caused by war, disease, and colonial expansion.
The region’s histories include Yesa:sahį́-speaking peoples and connections to communities whose descendants identify today with nations including the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, the Sappony Tribe, and the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe. In my land-acknowledgment research, Corey Roberts helped explain the importance of the name Yesá, “the people,” and the limitations of relying only on names applied by outsiders.
Corey Roberts’s work also offers a living connection to these histories. Through language revitalization, he brings students and community members together to learn and help rebuild Yesa:sahį́. The language belongs in conversations today, in classrooms and community gatherings, and in the lives of those who will carry it forward. All of us that call this place home should know these words: ta:xka: (forest), ta:skaho:i (oak), úti (acorn), wāstī (pine tree), ofo (pawpaw).
I return to the soil beneath the forest, to the surface on which other people walked. Above it, pawpaws grow and warblers return. Along the creek, people continue to learn, to remember, and to share what they know. These histories require us to carefully consider what a deed records, what it leaves out, and how a place comes to be known by the name of one landowner when many people have known it as home.
New Hope Creek connects the histories that follow. In the next post, I turn to a mill built along its banks: the water diverted, the grain ground, and the labor of people that the surviving stones cannot name for us.
References
Cagle, N. L. (2022, May 25; updated December 15). Field notes from the New Hope Creek archaeological excavation.
Comparative Siouan Dictionary (CSD), edited by Robert L. Rankin, Richard T. Carter, A. Wesley Jones, John E. Koontz, David S. Rood, and Iren Hartmann: https://cdstar.eva.mpg.de/bitstreams/EAEA0-4C22-790A-0FFC-0/csd_dataset.pdf .
Hale, H. (1883). The Tutelo Tribe and Language, vocabulary pp. 36–45
Heraty, M. (2022, December 12). Notes from the Duke Forest visit to UNC’s Research Laboratories of Archaeology.
Lawson, J. (1709). A new voyage to Carolina.
Liles, J. (Interviewer and transcriber). (2022). John Blackfeather Jeffries [Interview conducted March 13, 2019]. In Ribbons of color along the Eno River: The history of people of color living on the Eno (Eno Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 87–89). Eno River Association.
Living Dictionaries. https://livingdictionaries.app/tutelo-saponi/entries
Huler, S. (2023). Retracing their steps. Duke Magazine, revised online version.
Zeno, M. (2024, November 25). Corey Roberts works to revitalize the Indigenous language Yesa:sahį́ at Elon. Today at Elon.
Conversations with Indigenous elders and community members, recorded in my research notes.
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