The Moors of Delaware

[slick]

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The Moors of Delaware:

A Look at a Tri-Racial Group (author unknown)

An intermingling of races was one of the products which occurred with the early European exploration and settlement of the North American continent. Stemming from these earlier interminglings, there exists within the Eastern United States today, in numbers totaling between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand persons, a variety of surviving, localized strains of mixed blood peoples.1 Those called the Moors or the Delaware Moors are a group of such descent.

In a June, 1953 article, the geographer, Edward T. Price, mapped the locations of the chief populations of racially mixed groups in the Eastern United States (see Fig. 1).2 Through the particular geographic distributions of these groups, Price indicated how environmental circumstances, such as swamps or inaccessible and barren mountain country, favored their growth. Many of the groups are located along the tidewater of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts where swamps, islands, or peninsulas have protected them and kept alive a portion of the aboriginal blood which greeted the first white settlers on these shores. Other pockets of these groups are located farther inland, in the Western Piedmont area, backing up against the Blue Ridge and Alleghenies. A few of the groups are to be found along the top of the Blue Ridge, and on several ridges of the Appalachian Great Valley just beyond.

In addition to mapping the distribution and indicating environmental circumstances pertaining to these racially mixed groups, Price also noted a number of common phenomenon related to them. These groups have been presumed to be part white, with varying proportions of American Indian and Negro blood, although a lack of solid documentation concerning the origins of a good number of the groups makes determination of racial composition uncertain. Due to their particular racial mixtures, these groups are recognized as of intermediate social status, sharing lots with neither writes nor blacks, nor enjoying the government protection or tribal ties of typical Indian descendants.

Old census records have indicated that the present number of mixed bloods have sprung from great reproductive increases of small initial populations of the groups.3 The predominance of a limited number of surnames within each group at present is in line with such a conclusion, and is also indicative of their high degree of endogamy, resulting from their intermediate status and their relative geographic isolation from the mainstream population. Characteristics of generally lower educational and income levels, as well as large families, tend to further mark the racially mixed groups as members of the more backward sector of the American nation.

*End of Part I

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While all of the aspects mentioned above are descriptive of similarities between the various racially mixed groups distributed throughout the eastern United States, one must also realize that each group is essentially a unique phenomenon. Each one stems from a particular intermixture of races, and is related to a specific locale with recognition of the group crystallized by a name applied, either by the group itself or, by the people surrounding them in their region.

The phenomena which Price noted as common denominators in his analysis of racially mixed groups generally hold true for the people called Moors, who reside in the Kent and Sussex Counties of Delaware, and across the Delaware Bay in Southern New Jersey.

Concentrations consisting of members of this group are located in lowland, tidewater areas of the two states, areas which are basically rural, even today. (See map, Fig. 2). Moors make up the largest portion of the total population, (a little over three hundred persons), of the small community of Cheswold, Kent County , Delaware . (Cheswold is about five miles north of the larger state capital, Dover). These people also inhabit the rural area surrounding Cheswold. A number of Delaware Moors make their homes in and around the small town of Millsboro, and along the north shore of the Indian River in Sussex County, Delaware. In addition to the Moors living in and around Cheswold and Millsboro, Delaware, a similar, but more dispersed, number of Moor families live in rural, southern New Jersey. One finds Moor families in the farming territory outside of Bridgeton, Millville, and Vineland, New Jersey.

The location of the Cheswold community does not, at first, seem to concur with Price's indications that racially mixed groups flourish in relatively isolated geographic areas. The fact that Cheswold is so near to Dover, and also, just west of a major state highway, Delaware Route 13, is at variance with that thesis. However, farmlands have served somewhat as a buffer between Cheswold and Dover, and the Moor community has remained, up to the present, a separate entity. Information concerning the settlement in Cheswold by the Moors is more akin to Price's thesis.

There are indications that Cheswold was not the initial settlement area for this group of Moors. Informant Wilson Davis, a Delaware Moor, stated that the Moors of Cheswold originally lived about ten miles to the northeast at Woodland Beach, a more marshy area along the Delaware Bay. According to Mr. Davis, the Moors moved to farm farther inland and to settle in Cheswold during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as the result of a large storm which inundated much of the land surrounding Woodland Beach.4

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The Moorish areas in Sussex County, Delaware and in southern New Jersey are in more sparsely populated, rural regions. In both regions, the landscape is covered by truck farms or dense pine forests, and neither area is crisscrossed by major traffic routes.

Geography has played some part in setting the Moors start from the mainstream American population, but the racial composition of this group, linked to their origins, has played a more primary role. A number of scholars have taken note of this group which, for the most part, considers itself distinct from both Negro and white races. Researchers have examined their mixed blood characteristics and have endeavored to trace the precise origins of the Moors.5

In discussing the physical appearance of the Moors, as well as the Nanticoke Indian descendants to whom some Moors are related, C. A. Weslager wrote:



certain facial characteristics...set them apart from both whites and Negroes. The darkest have brown skins and the lightest resemble their white neighbors in complexion. Blonde, red and sandy hair may be seen, but the majority have brown or black hair, either wavy or straight and coarse like that of the full blooded American Indian. Kinky or woolen hair...is not often seen...straight noses and thin lips are typical. Eye colors range from grays and blues to dark brown and black. Many of the mixed bloods have sharply chiseled features, swarthy complexions and straight hair.... Others are distinctly Indian-like in appearance, having high and wide cheekbones, even among the same family. Light skinned Parent often have dark skinned children and vice versa. 6

No one has really been able to trace the precise origins of the Delaware Moors. Legend and historical hearsay have suggested possibilities. C. A. Weslager, in his book Delaware's Forgotten Folks, presents (in his own words) legends of three categories which he collected from Delaware Moors.7 One category of legend purports that the Moors originated sometime before the Revolutionary War through the founding of a colony along the Atlantic coast of the Delmarva peninsula by a group of dark skinned Spanish Moors. Through intermarriage with the local Indians come the people called Moors in Delaware and New Jersey.

A second category of legend Weslager refers to as pirate legends. These legends stated that Spanish or Moorish pirates, in the later eighteenth century, were shipwrecked off the Delaware coast in the Delaware Bay or near the Indian River Inlet. The shipwrecked men were taken in by the Nanticoke Indians and came to marry Indian women, thus beginning the mixed stock of Delaware Moors. Some versions of this legend considered the shipwrecked men as Spanish, French, or Moorish sailors and not buccaneers.

Weslager categorizes a third legend type, which he found most popular among the Moors, as romantic legend. In this legend type a beautiful woman and a dark-skinned slave or slaves are the central characters. The woman was wealthy, either Spanish or Irish, and lived on a plantation in southern Delaware. She purchased one male slave who turned out to have been a Spanish prince. They then fell in love and had children of dusky complexion. Not being accepted by the white community, the family sought associations elsewhere and consequently, mixed with the Indians in the vicinity of the plantation. Other modifications of this plot said that a similar women bought seven couples of Moorish slaves whose children intermarried with Indian descendants living on Indian River.

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Historically, there is foundation for the legends of the pirate category. Piracy was common in the Delaware Bay from about 1685 to 1750, and references cite occurrences of Spanish and French pirates preying on ships that entered the Delaware Bay.8 William Kelly, a citizen of Lewes, Delaware, was captured and taken aboard a French pirate ship in 1747. According to him the pirate crew of one hundred and thirty members consisted of "some English, some Irish, and some Scotch, but the most part of them were Frenchmen and Spaniards."9 In 1717, Delaware authorities issued a proclamation stating that they were willing to grant pardon to privateers who surrendered to the law and gave up their looting careers.10 In these ways pirates could have ventured to settle along the Delaware coast and engendered the Moorish strains in the existing local population.

However, this does not account for the fact that most of the surnames of the Delaware Moors suggest English descent. One researcher, Donald VanLear Downs, has endeavored to trace the origins of the Delaware Moors through an expedition launched in the 1680's by Charles II of England to Tangiers in North Africa. Downs employed as sources extracts from the "Calendar of State Papers--Domestic, October 1683 to April 1684" filed in the British Museum in London, and an oral account he received from a Tangier historian, a Mr. Maxwell Blake. Downs asserted that the Moors in Delaware have English surnames because a number of Charles II's companies, when disbanded in 1684, set sail for America accompanied by Moorish women. They supposedly landed on an island in the Chesapeake Bay and named it Tangier Island.11 Down's assertions may explain how Moorish blood reached the region, but they do not offer explanation as to why no Moors presently inhabit Tangier Island, or why a migration occurred from this possible initial settlement to the Indian River, Woodland Beach, or Cheswold areas of Delaware.

Although the specific origins of the Delaware Moors is unclear, most scholars and the Moors themselves, have tended to come to the consensus that the group can be identified as being a racial mixture of the Indians who once occupied the Delmarva region (the Nanticokes and the Lenni Lenape), of whites of European descent, and of some unspecified African strain. Also agreed upon is that the Moors of Delaware have come to be related, by blood and marriage ties, to the Nanticoke Indian descendants of Indian River Hundred, Sussex County, Delaware.

Returning to Price's thesis concerning tri-racial groups, one finds that, as with other groups, the Delaware Moors developed their particular racial mixture in much earlier times, (in this case, during the Colonial period), and that the present numbers in the group are descendants of that earlier mixed population. According, to written sources and informants, it has been customary for Moors to marry Moors.12 Because of this endogamy, the Delaware Moors today, as a group, consist of members of closely interrelated families. Informant Dorothy Carney listed eighteen Moor families of Cheswold and stated that branches of some of these families make up the Moor populations in both Sussex County, Delaware and in southern New Jersey.13

Price generalized that most tri-racial groups tended to have larger immediate families and lower educational and income levels than the mainstream population. None of my sources seemed to indicate that the Delaware Moors have larger than average numbers of offspring. However, in terms of education, most Moors do not progress beyond the high school level, and a good number of the Moors attended only grammar school. Relatively low educational attainment by the Moors as a group has been due, in part, to racial discrimination. Previously, in the Cheswold area, the Moors were barred from attending local white public schools, and many Moor parents did not wish their children to attend the separate black public schools. It was in 1923 that Pierre Samuel DuPont financed the erection of a three room schoolhouse to serve as the state-supported Cheswold School for the Moor children of grammar school ages.

The Cheswold School functioned as the primary educational Institution for the Moors of Cheswold until it was closed in 1964, along with the Fork Branch grammar school, (also built by P. S. DuPont in the twenties, and intended for blacks, though attended mainly by Cheswold area Moor children). It was not until the late 1950's, after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling and when school consolidation occurred, that Moor children could attend public high schools in the Dover area, and then more could pursue a college education. Prior to that time, numerous Moors did not attend high school, though some did enroll in correspondence courses and received high school diplomas by taking an equivalency examination.

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[Anja]

this is awesome vibe! i enjoy reading about these distinct american ethnic groups...started getting interested in melungeons...thanks for the great posts!

[slick]

You're welcome.

[Nincada]

I found this article on the melungeon site. It contains names along with maps on the geographic analysis of white-Negro-Indian in Eastern United States. You may find it interesting.

www.melungeon.org/index.cgi?&CONTEXT=cat&cat=10071

[slick]

It is quite interesting. I looked at the website and even read more information about the Carmel Indians. Thanks.