The Dimery Settlement

Ask Chief Hatcher where the Waccamaw came from and he would take you back two centuries, to a bend in the land near Dog Bluff, in Horry County — to the Dimery Settlement. It is the ground the modern tribe grew from.

300 acres, bought back

“In 1813 a fella named John Dimery … gathered together a bunch of his friends, collected some money, and they bought 300 acres of land back from Mr. Lewis. And that land is what became the Dimery Settlement.” — Chief Harold Hatcher, oral history, 2014

In the early 1800s, John Dimery and his wife Elizabeth purchased those 300 acres near Dog Bluff. They were soon joined by other families — Thompkins, Cook, Turner, Cooper, Hatcher, Elvis — and together they formed a small, insular farming community that would hold together for the better part of a century, with its own two churches and a school.

The census takers had no box for them. They were recorded as “mulatto” — a catch-all the era used for people who were neither White nor enslaved — and the county’s own newspaper struggled with the same question. The Horry Herald wrote, on April 23, 1921:

“They are mixed as to race, claiming that they have Indian blood in their veins.”

The schoolhouse, and the fight that ran in the blood

Being neither Black nor White was not a curiosity in the segregated South — it was a crisis, and it came for the settlement’s children. There was no school the county would let them attend. In 1923, a proposition was floated to set aside a schoolhouse for them alone. The Horry Herald, October 18, 1923:

“There was a proposition made … to set apart what is known as the Pine Level School in the Rehobeth District as a school which could be attended by the Dimery people and their relatives, and by people of the like kind from other school districts in that part of Horry County.”

That was the Pine Level School — the “Dimery School.” A dozen years later, in 1935, the county tried to fold the Indian children into the “colored” school instead. Chief Hatcher’s grandfather refused:

“My granddaddy — his name was Vander Hatcher — … took them all to the white school, and they wouldn’t let them in. … a group of white parents came out, beat the kids, and ran them away. So … my granddaddy sued the county.” — Chief Hatcher, oral history, 2014

The county’s answer was to sort the settlement’s children one by one, by the shade of their skin:

“One of my uncles went to the black school, and his sister went to the white school. Same mother, same father.”

It is the oldest chapter of the same argument the tribe is still making — that the Waccamaw are here, and always were.

From settlement to tribe

The Dimery Settlement never scattered. “Even today,” Chief Hatcher said, “there’s a lot of Indians living in and around that area.” When the modern tribe organized in 1992 and later acquired its 20 acres of Tribal Grounds at Dog Bluff (2004), it was coming home to the same ground John Dimery bought back in 1813 — and the Pauwau and Waccamaw Day are held there still.