[2] The historic Tuscarora tribe, an Iroquoian-language group originally from western New York, had been well established in North Carolina, including along the Pamlico River, before European contact.

Since European contact, they had lost much population due to lack of immunity to new infectious diseases, followed by the casualties of war.

A cluster of German and Swiss settlers also moved to the region from the southeastern settlement of New Bern, North Carolina.

Most settlers engaged in tobacco farming in the Pamlico/Tar River basin, importing numerous enslaved Africans to work on the labor-intensive crop.

It is linked to the history of thousands of years of human settlement, from the earliest indigenous peoples, through the Tuscarora and later European and American settlers.