Location: US 311 at Dan River bridge northeast of Walnut Cove
County: Stokes
Original Date Cast: 1955
Around A.D. 1000, ancestors of the Saura Indians gathered to live in villages along the banks of the Dan River. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the tribe built the village of Upper Saura Town in Stokes County, and thirty miles downstream in Rockingham County, near present-day Eden, Lower Saura Town. The Saura Indians were among the earliest inhabitants of Piedmont North Carolina and belong to the Siouan language group. As a result of frequent attacks by Seneca Indians, a band within the Iroquois Confederacy, the Saura left Upper Saura Town in 1710 and moved southeast, along with the Keyauwee Tribe, to establish a settlement on the Pee Dee River near the North Carolina-South Carolina border. In 1711, forty-two Saura Indians joined South Carolina Colonel John Barnwell’s expedition against the Tuscarora.
Through their interactions with South Carolina, the Saura became known as the Charraw (Cheraw). North Carolina’s Governor Charles Eden and the South Carolina government declared war against the Saura as part of the Yamassee War. By the end of the war in 1718, their total population, probably including the Keyauwee, had shrunk from 1,200 (estimated in 1600) to 510. The Saura continued to suffer attacks from the Iroquois and were obliged to incorporate with the Catawba Nation. In 1768, survivors numbered only fifty or sixty. While surveying land around the North Carolina-Virginia border in 1728, William Byrd came across the former Saura villages, and his 1733 map was the first to document the location of Lower Saura Town. Byrd was so impressed with the beauty of the place that he went back later and purchased 26,000 acres of land in the area. The Stokes County community Sauratown, which existed until 1894, was named after the Saura. The Saura name can still be found in the Suwali Gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Saura Town Mountains in Stokes County, and Cheraw, South Carolina.
References:
Ethel Stephens Arnett, The Saura and Keyauwee in the Land that became Guilford, Randolph, and Rockingham (1975) James Mooney, The Siouan Tribes of the East (1894) North Carolina Indian Tribes website: http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/northcarolina
Stokes County Website: http://www.stokescounty.org/stokesyesterday.htm
William S. Powell, North Carolina Gazetteer (1968)
Indian Communities on the North Carolina Piedmont A.D. 1000 to 1700 (1993) H. Trawick Ward and R.P. Stephen Davis
The Sara and Dan River Peoples: Siouan Communities in North Carolina's Interior Piedmont from A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1700 (1999) Jane M. Eastman
Fit for War: Sustenance and Order in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Catawba Nation (2017) Mary Elizabeth Fitts