Pomona Brooks Family Cemetery

The Brooks Family Cemetery in now Griffin, Spalding GA, is also known as the Pamuna - or as the English spelled it - Pomona Cemetery. It was a burial ground for members of Native American / American Indian families e.g. Brooks (related to the currently recognised Lumbee family of the same name in now Robeson NC) and Kilgore (long known as Native American / American Indian also from now NC).

Pamuna / Pomona is likely from the same word used to identify what are known today as Pamunkey Indians, of the Powhatan Confederacy, which is in an Algonkin language. Pamun - the root word, plus -key is locative, and indicates a place, so Pamunkey would be the place of Pamun, the place where it grows. I believe that word was originally written down by Captain John Smith in 1612 as Pemmenaw. From what he wrote of the "Virginia Indians":

"Betwixt their hands and thighes, their women use to spin the barks of trees, deare sinews, or a kind of grasse they call Pemmenaw; of these they make a thred very even and readily. This thred serveth for many uses, as about their housing, apparell, as also they make nets for fishing, for the quantity as formally braded as ours. They make also with it lines for angles . . . They use long arrows tyed in a line wherewith they shoote at fish in the rivers."

At the beginning of contact between Englishmen and Native Americans, English speakers would write down what they heard of Native languages. Spellings especially of words in Native languages were not fixed and could, and did, change over time.

Pamuna, Pomona, Pemmenaw, a Native grass, is also known as Wiregrass and as Pineland three-awn grass, Latin Aristida stricta.

Shortly before or just after the 1803 Tuscarora diaspora from now Bertie NC, at least a generation before the Treaty of Indian Springs 1821, Native American families were on the move all over the southeast piedmont. Many joined the Mvskoke / Muscogee Creek in their territory, both Kawita "Lower Creeks" and Kusa "Upper Creeks".

The name of the community - in Mvskoke Kawita "Lower Creek" territory - at first was Nokose Hvcce / Nokosy Hatchee, Bear Creek. There was a trading post run by one of the Lowery family, no doubt a relation of the Lumbee / NC Tuscarora Lowery family. The centre of Bear Creek was the trading post, where the men would gather. Some of the people - those who were beginning to self-identify more as "white" and enculturate themselves as English-speaking Christians - moved part of the town east and called it Hampton.

Bear Creek split up into three small communities, of which Vineyard was one. At least two communities retained their Native American identity and retained some of their Native American cultures, Pamuna / Pomona (Virginia Algonkin language speakers) and Birdie (North Carolina Iroquoian language speakers), named for Bertie NC.

When the county lines were drawn for the State of Georgia, after the c 1827 Treaty (which replaced the one of 1821) with the Mvskoke Kawita / Muskogee Creek Indians, those three communities of Nokose Hvcce / Bear Creek were in Henry County, Georgia. Later on they became part of Spalding County, Georgia, and in 1850 when Griffin set out his plans to build a city (to be named after himself), the Native American communities - which subsequently were unilaterally believed extinct, though traces remain - were located in what was named the Africa District.

Despite all this, and to this day, the Brooks family cemetery retained the name Pamuna / Pomona < Virginia Algonkin language Pemmenaw as a reminder of who we are and where we originate, and our relations and antécédents: Coastal Carolina and Virginia Indians who were Algonkin language speakers who once made use of the Wiregrass that grew in the region.

-- L. A. Childress, 18 Apr, edit 29 Apr 2017, added here 22 Feb, edit 4 Nov 2018
matrilineal descendant of southeast Native American / American Indian families
MD to VA - NC to GA
Brooks, Kilgore, Smith, Blackman / Blackmon, Williams, Bell, Miles, etc.

Brooks Kilgore  (family site)