By Michael E.C. Gery
Most of us know about the English attempts in the 1580s to establish a permanent settlement on Roanoke Island. The project ended when some 112 men, women and children failed to secure a foothold on the island and by 1590 had vanished. It has long been known as the “lost colony.”
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Fewer of us know much about another, more successful attempt to establish a permanent colony on Roanoke Island, not far from the “lost colony” site, between 1862 and 1867. At its most robust, by the end of 1863, the Freedmen’s Colony on Roanoke Island contained about 3,000 residents, most of whom had been slaves three years earlier in the surrounding mainland of northeastern North Carolina. It was the largest community ever on the Outer Banks, on an island that beforehand was populated by about 600 people (two-thirds white, and one-third black, including some 170 slaves). The Freedmen’s Colony, under supervision of the U.S. military, had established its own schools, churches, craft business and a sawmill, and had built about 600 houses and gardens. And it gave people who formerly had been denied any civil rights, a taste of citizenship, family life and hope.
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