Copyright Notice: This article is from the Encyclopedia of North Carolina edited by William S. Powell. Copyright © 2006 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. For personal use and not for further distribution. Please submit permission requests for other use directly to the publisher.

"Neuse River Cliffs of the Neuse." The Coree Indians Lived along the Neuse. Photo courtesy of Flickr user bobistraveling, uploaded October 30, 2010.
The Coree Indians Lived along the Neuse. Photo courtesy of Flickr user bobistraveling.
Coree Indians, when first encountered by Europeans arriving in what is now North Carolina, were living south of the Neuse River along the Atlantic Coast. Like other Indians of the Coastal Plain, the Coree (or Core) lived in villages, reportedly three in number, and depended for their livelihood on both agriculture and the ocean. Sharply reduced in numbers by epidemic disease and warfare, they totaled perhaps 100 persons by 1701. Scholars debate whether the Coree spoke an Algonquian or an Iroquoian language. They seem to have been closely associated with the nearby Tuscarora, who spoke an Iroquoian language. At any rate, the Coree allied with the Tuscarora during the Tuscarora War of 1711-13 and were nearly obliterated. Presumably some Coree survivors joined the Tuscarora after the war and may have moved north to the Iroquois country in New York with them. Most, however, joined together with the remnants of other coastal tribes and settled on a reservation at Lake Mattamuskeet. Core Banks and Core Sound on the North Carolina coast were both named for the Coree Indians.

References:

Maurice A. Mook, "Algonkian Ethnohistory of the Carolina Sound," Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 34 (15 June, 15 July 1944).

Ruth Y. Wetmore, First on the Land: The North Carolina Indians (1975).

Image Credit:

"Neuse River Cliffs of the Neuse." The Coree Indians Lived along the Neuse. Photo courtesy of Flickr user bobistraveling, uploaded October 30, 2010. Available from https://www.flickr.com/photos/bobistraveling/5138592370/ (accessed May 23, 2012).

Citation

Green, Michael D. "Coree Indians." NCpedia. Encyclopedia of North Carolina, University of North Carolina Press. Accessed on February 22nd, 2025. https://www.ncpedia.org/coree-indians.