Pates Community Analysis

The University of North Carolina at Pembroke has continuously represented the history and values of the local area. From the founding of the university as the Croatan Normal School in the late nineteenth century to its current state, the state supported university grew exponentially in numbers and capability. Originally established for the Lumbees of the area, then called Croatans, the Croatan Normal School served to educate a community lacking essential education. However, a testament to its current size, the North Carolina University sprang from a vision to make education more accessible to all individuals seeking it. From the beginning, the creation of a school proved to be beneficial to the local Native American community. It would not …show more content…
The Pates Community was a center of commerce for the area also bustling with social and religious activity, making it the “heart of the Lumbee community.” The town of Pembroke had not yet been established, however, the current location of the University is about one and a half miles from the original building in the Pates community (Locklear, et al. 24). The Robeson County Board of Education already had a tract of land in the Pates community. An additional acre of land was sold by a reverend by the name of William Jacobs and his wife to the Robeson County Board of Education, for seven dollars. Five dollars later and they had the land they needed to build the Normal School (Locklear, et al. 25). The building they erected was a “two-story clapboard structure that would have cost one thousand dollars to build.” Luckily the Lumbee people came together and provided the materials and donated the time and labor it took to construct the Croatan Normal School. Its doors opened in the fall of 1887 (Locklear, et al. 26). Indian people encouraged their youth to attend the Normal School. Here they would maintain their cultural and family ties, in contrast to the boarding schools run by the Federal Government. The objective of these boarding schools was to assimilate Indians into a white society and “destroy Indian cultural communities” (Locklear, et al. 27). The construction of …show more content…
Waccamaw Siouan Indian Reverend William Luther Moore was elected as the first principal and only teacher of the Croatan Normal School for the first three years. He quit his job teaching in Robeson County for a year and gave his services to the Croatan Normal School in order to help complete the project in two years as required by the legislative act (Register 25). Reverend Moore,“ was an ordained Methodist minister, teacher, administrator and farmer.” The Department of Music’s Moore Hall, built adjacent to Old Main in 1951, is named in honor of him (Locklear, et al. 22). The Croatan Normal School was built solely for a Native American population, stipulating that only those above the age of 15 may attend. These students would then operate under a contract designating that they teach in Robeson County for a period of time after completion of the program. As a result, a total of 15 students enrolled when Moore began to teach in the fall of 1887 (Register 25). Some of the first students Moore taught included “Dr. Governor Worth Locklear, the first Lumbee doctor in Robeson County, Rev. O.R. Sampson and Anderson N. Locklear” (Locklear, et al. 26). The curriculum of the Croatan Normal School began only teaching up to the seventh grade level. However, the school curriculum began to change vastly when it included a two year teacher training program in 1926 and the