NANTICOKE'S

MONGREL RACE OF DELAWARE

The Tiller And Toiler , Larned, Kansas, October 11, 1895

The Milford Delaware Herald says there is much speculation about the Moors now living in Kent and Sussex counties of Delaware, who are swarthy, black haired, black eyes, with a fair complexion. Most are farmers. They have their own schools distinct from the General Public school system. They associate mostly with neither the black nor white population.

There are two theories of their ancestry. The first is that they are ancestors of Spanish Moors which are said to have survived a ship wreck off the Cape Henlopen Coast more than a century ago. The other tradition represents them as descendant of the Nanticoke Indian Tribe.

George P. Fisher, a Delaware lawyer, and one time State Attorney General, presents satisfactory evidence on the origin of these people which he has been acquainted with all his life, one being Noke Norwood , age 75.

As the State Attorney he was called upon to prosecute one of the race, Levin Sockum, for selling guns and ammunition to another of the race, Isaiah Harmon, which in Delaware was a misdemeanor. Harmon, age 25, with Caucasian features, chestnut hair, hazel eyes, and very handsome. A kinswoman of Harmon, Lydia Clark, an old woman of Indian pure blood, testified for the state that according to family tradition , that prior to the Revolution , a white woman farm owner, an Irish by name of Regas, in Indian River Hundred , did buy of a slaver at Lewes, a shipwreck survivor , supposed to have been the Chief of a Congo tribe and a negro which she later married and had off spring which the whites did not associate with but did intermarry with the Nanticokes that still live in Sussex county about the Indian River.