The historic Scarborough Cemetery in Manteo is shown as it appeared in early November 2024 after an initial cleanup revealed four graves. (Photo courtesy Marilyn Berry Morrison, chief of the Roanoke-Hatteras Tribe of the Algonquian Indians of North Carolina)
By Corinne Saunders
MANTEO — Local residents who trace their roots to the Indigenous people of the Outer Banks invite volunteers to help clean up the Scarborough Cemetery, located at 1006 Driftwood Drive in Manteo, beginning at 11 a.m. on Saturday.
An earlier cleanup of the overgrown site on Nov. 9 revealed four graves of a suspected total of about a dozen. Saturday’s expanded effort will continue tackling years’ worth of overgrowth and litter, according to a Nov. 17 press release from Marilyn Berry Morrison, chief of the Roanoke-Hatteras Tribe of the Algonquian Indians of North Carolina.
“The ancestors of our community deserve a clean, beautiful resting place,” Morrison wrote in the release. “It is now our time to give back for all they have given us to establish a better life for us.”
The cemetery preservation efforts also serve also as “an affirmation of our history, identity, and resilience as Roanoke-Hatteras Indians,” Morrison told Outer Banks Insider.
Morrison has been leading efforts for official tribal recognition for the past 15 years, petitioning the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs to recognize this area’s first inhabitants.
Chief Marilyn Berry Morrison, dressed in regalia, leads a “Circle of Life” ceremony in Manteo in November 2022. (Photo by Corinne Saunders)
She’s also been advocating for the Manteo cemetery’s cleanup for years, which has been hampered by the fact it’s on private property, contacting the landlord was difficult and efforts to obtain the county’s assistance were unsuccessful.
Family members buried in the cemetery include “Mark Scarborough, a notable figure in our lineage who served in the Civil War and dedicated himself to the unique craft of yaupon tea harvesting, an art that is deeply rooted in our Indigenous heritage,” Morrison said.
Scarborough lived on Hatteras Island. But following the closure of School No. 2 in Buxton, for which he’d served as a commissioner, he “broke down his house, put it on a boat, and he sailed from Hatteras to Roanoke Island,” where he rebuilt his house, Morrison said in a 2022 interview for a Milepost magazine story.
The county had closed that Buxton “colored school” around 1884, Morrison told Outer Banks Insider. Scarborough continued educating non-white children on Roanoke Island—because at that time, Black, Native American and mixed-race children were not permitted to attend white schools.
Dawn Taylor, an Avon resident and publicly listed president of the Hatteras Island Genealogical and Preservation Society, found Scarborough’s grave in 2015, Morrison said. In late October, “we received permission from the owner to go on the property at any time to clean up the cemetery.”
The cemetery is a separate parcel from adjacent lots, and measures 1,000 square feet, according to Dare County property records.
“Mark Scarborough’s legacy is intertwined with that of his grandfather, a Revolutionary War patriot, and our lineage is embedded in the very soil of this land—land our people have tended for centuries,” Morrison said. “Peter’s Creek, named after Mark Scarborough’s father, stands as a living testament to our family’s roots and contributions to Hatteras.”
In 2020, Morrison wrote a letter to county officials and commissioners in which she described thick vegetation, as well as debris from cut trees and trash being thrown over the area she believes contains at least 11 graves.
Rev. Dr. Michelle Lewis, a Manteo resident who said she is a descendant of both the Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony and of the Hatteras-Roanoke tribe, read Morrison’s letter at the Dare County Board of Commissioners’ July 16 meeting during public comment. Lewis also requested the appropriation of funds for the cemetery’s perpetual maintenance.
Lewis noted that there are Black gravesites that have been “desecrated” all over Roanoke Island.
“We want your assistance in actually preserving these graves because we should be wanting to preserve the history of all of our ancestors…and this is a really rich part of our community’s history,” Lewis told commissioners.
While commissioners did not allocate funding, Morrison said on Monday that they are moving forward with cleanup because of the site’s importance.
“Our cemetery is more than a place of rest; it is a monument to our people’s enduring spirit, connection to our homeland, and Native pride,” she wrote in a prepared statement to Outer Banks Insider.
“As the First Americans who greeted European foreigners in the 1500s, our tribe has remained steadfast here on the Outer Banks, preserving our legacy despite centuries of hardship,” she continued. “Preserving this cemetery safeguards our story, ensuring our contributions and struggles are not overshadowed by mainstream narratives but instead honored as part of America’s foundation.”
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