 Beginning just prior to the Revolutionary War, and accelerating rapidly thereafter, individuals and bands of families began migrating from the acculturated settlement to Orange County, North Carolina. These migrants formed the community that was historically called “Little Texas” and that today calls itself the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. Some families also migrated from Virginia to South Carolina (Sumter County), and beginning in the 1820s, most of the families remaining in Virginia or nearby areas of North Carolina emigrated to Ohio and other Midwestern states. Some Indians also migrated from Little Texas to join relatives in Ohio.
While there appear to be few if any descendants today in either Brunswick or Greensville County, Virginia there is a small remnant community still in existence across the State line in Northampton County near the town of Gaston on the Roanoke River. Even this community, called the “Portuguese Settlement” throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, has largely dispersed. Up into the 1950's, however, at least one of the community’s schools, called the “Portuguese” school, was still located in Greensville County.
The Revolutionary War was as key event among the Occaneechi community as it was in the rest of the colonies. Existing records count a sizeable number of men as having served in militia and Continental Line units during the War, service that took them much farther afield than any of the younger men had probably ever been. Pension records indicate that at least a few of them marched as far south as the Catawbas via the old trading routes that traversed Hillsboro and ran just to the south of Pleasant Grove, North Carolina; at least one (William Stewart) was a veteran of Valley Forge; and several served at Yorktown and other eastern Virginia areas.
Veterans of the War and their families were among the founders of Little Texas, including those of Charles Whitmore, John Jeffries, Jr., John Jeffries, Sr., Jacob Jeffries, Simon Jeffries, Holiday Heathcock, and others had moved their families to Little Texas by 1800. The community was also joined by the children of William Guy, a War veteran who was born in the Virginia community and who moved to North Carolina after the War.
Another important early family in Little Texas was that of Robert Brooks Corn, the son of Robert Corn, an Indian who was a veteran of both the French and Indian War and of the Revolutionary War. Robert Brooks Corn was married in 1795 in Greensville County to Jane Jeffries, moving about 1800 to Wake County, North Carolina with his father and their extended family. After his father’s death in 1816, Robert Brooks Corn moved his family to Little Texas, where three of his wife’s siblings, John, Drury and Littleton Jeffries, along with numerous cousins, were already established.
By 1830, census records indicate the population of Little Texas was between 250–300 by that time, at least 80% of it being traceable to the acculturated community in Greensville and Northampton Counties. Those not traceable to the parent community, however, appear to have been of a similar background, i.e., of Indian or partial Indian descent. Virtually all of the members of the Occaneechi Band descend from these original settlers of Little Texas.
In 1984, some of the Indians from Little Texas, and from an offshoot community called “Oaks,” communities formally reorganized as the Eno-Occaneechi Indian Association with the goal of preserving the Indian heritage of the community and teaching the young about their own history. The group began a concerted effort to conduct research into their history, and to seek to correct the racial mis-classifications on their birth certificates and other official documents that resulted from Jim Crow and other racist laws that had at one time been on North Carolina’s books. In addition, the Indian Association organized an annual Pow-wow, which has been held in August for the past six years, with Indians from many different tribes visiting with the community. In 1995, the Tribal Council amended the name to “The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation” to reflect the historical record more accurately.
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