Board's been a tad quiet lately. This topic always seems to raise a nest of hornets. It's off of an otherwise unidentified Google page. The Portuguese Settlement In the northwest section of Northampton County, North Carolina, just a mile or two from the Virginia state line, lie the fading remnants of what was once called the "Portuguese" Settlement. Centered in Gaston Township, along the Roanoke River , this community of Poythresses, Basses, Turners, Scotts, Newsoms, and Peterses had it's own school, Bethany, and it's own church, run as a mission by a white Gaston congregation. At least one store in the community was owned by a member of the group. While local legend has it that these people descend from Portuguese workers brought in to work on the dam on the Roanoke, the family names cane be traced back well into the late 18th Century in the area. Their ancestry is almost certainly Indian, from either or both the Saponi and the Nottoway. Several of the Scotts who moved from the area to South Carolina obtained papers attesting to their Indian ancestry after they arrived in Sumpter County. There are many descendants of this community in the region today, but the community as a whole has disintegrated. Only the old graveyard remains to mark the site of this once thriving community of primarily small tenant farmers.