History

Earliest Period

Archaeological excavations now being performed throughout Robeson County reveal a long and rich history of widespread and consistent occupation, especially near the Lumbee, or Lumber River since the end of the last Ice Age. The Lumbee, or Lumber River winds its way through Pembroke. Indeed, precursor settlements to what is now Pembroke sprung up alongside the river's banks, and artifacts found there have been dated to the early Woodland period. This suggests that Native American settlements along the river were part of an extensive trade network with other regions of what is now the Southeast of the United States. After colonial contact, European-made items, such as kaolin tobacco pipes, were traded by the Spanish, French, and the English to Native American peoples of the coast, and found their way within Pembroke's reach long before Europeans established their settlements.

Swamps, streams, and artesian wells provided an excellent supply of water for Native peoples. Fish was plentiful, and the regions lush vegetation included numerous food crops. "Carolina bays," creeks, swamps, pocosins, and longleaf pines continue to mark the distinctive wetland landscape of Pembroke.

In 1725, colonial English surveyors for the Wineau factory mapped a village of Waccamaw Siouan Indians on the Lumber River, a few miles west of present-day Pembroke. In 1754, North Carolina Governor Arthur Dobbs received a report from his agent, Col. Rutherford, the head of a Bladen County militia, that a settlement of 50 Indian families were living along Drowning Creek and in the same vicinity of the Siouan Waccamaw settlement. These are the first written accounts of the Native Americans from whom the Lumbee tribe descend.

Bust of Henry Berry Lowrie

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the settlement was named "Scuffletown". Toward century's end, the town was named for a railroad official, Pembroke Jones. A Lumbee Indian from "Scuffletown", Henry Berry Lowrie, who, during the post-Civil War years, appropriated white Revolutionary doctrine to gain rights and freedoms that were being denied to Indians in the Pembroke area, as well as throughout Robeson County. Lowrie become a Lumbee culture hero, representing those cultural and political boundaries that marked the Indians of Robeson County as a community of self-determining Native American people. Henry Berry Lowrie is the protagonist of the outdoor Lumbee drama, "Strike at the Wind".

Statue of Hamilton McMillan

In 1885, Representative Hamilton McMillan (August 29, 1837 - February 27, 1916), of Robeson County, introduced legislation in the North Carolina General Assembly giving the Indians of Robeson County a legal identity and schools of their own. On March 7, 1887, the General Assembly enacted legislation, sponsored by McMillan, creating the Croatan Normal School (now The University of North Carolina at Pembroke).

Fifteen students and one teacher composed the initial complement. With the goal of educating Native American teachers, enrollment was limited to the Native American Indians of Robeson County.

In 1909, the school moved to its present location, about a mile east of the original site. The name was changed in 1911 to the Indian Normal School of Robeson County, and again in 1913 to the Cherokee Indian Normal School of Robeson County. In 1926 the school became a two-year post-secondary normal school; until then it had provided only primary and secondary instruction.

 

In 1939 it became a four-year institution, a change followed in 1941 by a new name: Pembroke State College for Indians. The next year, the school began to offer bachelor's degrees in disciplines other than teaching. In 1945 the college was opened to members of all federally recognized tribes. A change of name to Pembroke State College in 1949 presaged the admission of white students, which was approved in 1953 up to forty percent of total enrollment; the Brown v. Board of Education decision of the following year eliminated all race restrictions.

In 1969 the college became Pembroke State University, a regional university which was incorporated into the University of North Carolina System in 1972. The first master's degree program was implemented in 1978. On July 1, 1996, Pembroke State University became the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

As of 2003, UNCP has 204 full-time faculty members and an enrollment of 4,472 students engaged in fifty-five undergraduate programs and fifteen graduate programs. The university's profile and attention has increased recently as the result of an aggressive statewide advertising campaign, in which billboards and radio advertisements have touted UNCP as a place "where learning gets personal."