Harlowe (NCS-SAR) Patriots Little Known History Facts

The Patriot Isaac Carter Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution was chartered on September 3, 2016. 

Isaac Carter was born c. 1760 and was a "Free Mulatto" from Craven County, North Carolina.  On September 1, 1777, he enlisted as a private in the 10th North Carolina Regiment under Capt. Silas Stephenson (Stevenson) and Col. Abraham Sheppard (Shepard), for three years or the duration of the war. In the winter of 1778, Isaac Carter served under Capt. John Tillman (or Tilghman) in the garrison of Fort Hancock at Cape Lookout North Carolina, along with Joshua Carter, William Dove and Isaac Perkins. Tillman's men were enlisted for a period of one year and remained on duty at the fort for a total of two years. 

In June 1783, Carter left his regiment. In 1785, he received comptroller's office certificate number 4409 for militia service in the Wilmington District during the Revolution.  He was listed as a free Negro in the North Carolina 1790 census of Craven County, with a family of five. Among his neighbors were William Dove and Isaac Perkins. 

Isaac Carter was one of fourteen Patriots from the Harlowe, NC communities that served the cause of independence during the American Revolution.  In an earlier step aimed at correcting history, the NC Society of the Sons of the American Revolution dedicated a memorial marker to those "Forgotten Patriots" on March 16, 2014 at the Havelock-Harlowe Senior Center.

The four small communities that make up what is known as the Harlowe area were settled by a group of FREE African-American families who came from Virginia and Maryland well before the American Revolution.  In the absence of documented historical research, we don't know exactly when those families reached the Harlowe area, but they were certainly here in the 1750's. This makes the settlements of the Harlowe area among the earliest free African-American settlements in North Carolina.  They may have arrived in the Harlowe area as many as thirty years prior to the 1750's. Whenever those families arrived in the Harlowe area, their story is part of the early settlement of North Carolina that is rarely told - but it is a story that needs to be told! 

Learn More About The Harlowe Patriot's History Here!