The Bethany School
The Portuguese Settlement In the northwest section of Northampton County, North Carolina, just a mile or two from the Virginia state line, lie the fading remnants of what was once called the "Portuguese" Settlement. Centered in Gaston Township, along the Roanoke River , this community of Poythresses, Basses, Turners, Scotts, Newsoms, and Peterses had it's own school, Bethany, and it's own church, run as a mission by a white Gaston congregation. At least one store in the community was owned by a member of the group. While local legend has it that these people descend from Portuguese workers brought in to work on the dam on the Roanoke, the family names cane be traced back well into the late 18th Century in the area. Their ancestry is almost certainly Indian, from either or both the Saponi and the Nottoway. Several of the Scotts who moved from the area to South Carolina obtained papers attesting to their Indian ancestry after they arrived in Sumpter County. There are many descendants of this community in the region today, but the community as a whole has disintegrated. Only the old graveyard remains to mark the site of this once thriving community of primarily small tenant farmers. 1910 US Census The 1910 Federal Census for Gaston Township listed the following heads of families and their members' race as "Ot" for "Other", with the notation in the margin "Portuguese". All these families lived along River Road, and their relative further down the road, who were enumerated by a different census taker, were listed as Black or Mulatto.
This is a total of 17 families containing 88 individuals, with the surnames Newsome, Conwell, and Ellis also appearing. The Scotts, Poythresses, and Turners all intermarried with the Jeffries and Haithcocks who were living in both Greensville and Northampton. One of the main lines of Occaneechi Jeffrieses in Alamance descends from the marriage of Drewry Jeffries and Sylvia Scott in Greensville Co. in 1790. Macklin Jeffries, the father of William Jeffries, who moved to Rush Co., Indiana, had married Mary Turner in Northampton County before moving to Indiana. Above is a photograph of the Diamond Grove school in southern Greensville County, Virginia, taken in 1997. It lies about 3 miles north of the NC/Va. State line. This school, formerly a Black school, was apparently used as a school for the "Portuguese" residing in Greensville County until the late 1950's. The Turners were the most well-known family of the group in Greensville, described by some of the whites as "gypsy-looking", and remaining separate from both white and Blacks in the area. Douglas Summers Brown's papers contain brief notes on the Indian background of the Turners. Below is a section of the 1910 Federal Census of Gaston Township, Northampton County, showing some of the families enumerated as "Portuguese" living along River Road, now Rt. 46, west of the town of Gaston. These families represent the remnant of the Saponi community along the border. They are the families who remained after the main body migrated to the Texas Settlement beginning in the 1780s. Many of the "Portuguese" families went to Greensville county to get married; apparently because they could be married there as whites with less difficulty in the late 1800s.
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