Rhoda Strong Lowry and her husband Henry Berry Lowry aren’t really obscure or unknown as such, particularly not Henry Berry, who has been the subject of a number of books and creative works. At one point during his life Henry Berry Lowry was more famous and written about more comprehensively in American and European newspapers than his contemporary Jesse James. But I think their story is the kind of history that a show like Doctor Who should be working with far more often, and I can see the creative fit really clearly when I think about them both.
Henry Berry Lowry first became famous as an outlaw during the Civil War in south-central North Carolina. He was a member of the Lumbee Indians, a Native American group with a complex history, recounted especially well in Malinda Maynor Lowery’s The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle. It’s hard to neatly summarize. The best I can do is that the Lumbees were Native Americans who moved their settlements in response to the invasion of European settlers to an area of what is now North Carolina, around the Lumber River (hence their name), partly in hopes of avoiding the attention of the colonial government. That hope was at least partially fulfilled into the early 19th Century, with Lumbee communities interacting with and intermarrying with some settlers and enslaved peoples, which led to them being classed as “free people of color” or “mulatto” in the years just before the Civil War and subject to increasingly harsh harassment by the North Carolina government as a result, but avoiding removal unlike many other Native American groups in the U.S. Southeast. In part because of this complex history, the Lumbees are not a federally recognized group, which under some circumstances leads to a lot of complicated wrangling about their identity and about claims to Lumbee status. (The Talk tab for Henry Berry Lowry’s Wikipedia page has one particularly tendentious example of this; the Lumbee page even more so.)
Lowry became the leader of a multiracial (though mostly Lumbee) group called the Lowry Band or Lowry Gang (so named even before he stepped in) after his father and brother were executed by Confederate officials in retaliation for the murder of two of their men. In the latter half of the American Civil War. Lumbee communities after 1863 found themselves increasingly opposed to the Confederate government after having being conscripted for grueling forms of manual labor. Many tried to avoid the authorities by retreating into swamp refuges where they were joined by former slaves and Union soldiers who escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp.
Lowry’s insurgents continued to fight against the North Carolina authorities after the Civil War up to 1872 and beyond. The ups-and-downs of the “Lowry War” are a super-compelling story that drives deep into the local complexity of Reconstruction, and I’m a bit surprised that there have been no recent adaptations of this history in television or film; the last I have read of is the play Strike at the Wind. (William McKee Evans’ 1995 book To Die Game: The Story of the Lowry Band, Indian Guerillas of Reconstruction is a good scholarly recounting.) Though perhaps I’m not so surprised, really—it’s one thing to romanticize fictional or mythological white smugglers, bandits and pirates and another thing for Hollywood in any era, even now, to portray a quite real group of charismatic and righteous multiracial rebels and outlaws fighting against white authorities in the last half of the 19th Century in North Carolina. In any event, contemporary Lumbee communities very much celebrate Lowry’s legacy and to some extent the state of North Carolina today is willing to go along with that celebration.
Malinda Lowery recounts that Rhoda Strong was the child of a Scottish man and a Lumbee woman who grew up alongside Henry Berry Lowry in the community known as Scuffletown (a common vernacular community name in a lot of the 19th Century American South; it’s called Pembroke today, just northwest of Lumberton). Her brothers were part of the Lowry gang living in the swamps. When she married Henry Berry Lowry in 1865, he was arrested by the militia during the wedding, but he escaped from a supposedly unescapable prison almost immediately afterwards. Rhoda was at one point held hostage along with the wives of some of the other Lowry Gang members; Henry Berry demanded their release or he would otherwise “drench the county in blood and ashes”, whereupon authorities let the women go.
Lowry’s death is part of his mythology: he was last seen in a robbery in 1872, just before which he allegedly said “I’m done, I’m going away now”. One narrative tradition has him being killed either in an argument or an accident during the division of the loot, but there are a number of stories (according to Malinda Lowery, favored today by many Lumbees) that Henry Berry faked his death and left Robeson County altogether, some of which his wife would endorse in her later years.
Rhoda Strong Lowry has attracted some recent attention: there’s a 2000 historical novel by Josephine Humphreys focused on her (Nowhere Else on Earth), a 2007 article by Eneida Sanderson Pugh, and a 2021 book Strong Like Rhoda by Dana Lowery Ramseur. (Both Pugh and Ramseur are Lumbee.) Various stories about the Lowry War, some of them undoubtedly embellished later on, often put her in the classic role of accomplice who smuggles weapons or files into jail or otherwise helps the gang during their war against the North Carolina establishment.
One of the interesting things about Rhoda Strong Lowry’s life after Henry Berry left the scene is not just that she managed to keep her household and children afloat without her husband (and with other losses—her brother was killed not long after Henry Berry’s disappearance/death) but also that she was said to be running a major bootlegging operation near the end of the 19th Century. (She was jailed in 1897 for selling liquor without a license.) Most of the sources I can find on her insist that she did not remarry, either. She ended up being known as “The Queen of Scuffletown” (though there’s some interesting range in the histories that discuss her specifically about when she acquired that reputation—during the Lowry War or afterwards); she died in 1909.
It’s that history that I think makes Rhoda Strong Lowry a strong candidate for this column—a vivid individual who isn’t as known to contemporary audiences as she should be, where there’s room to tell an imaginary story about her life that includes some dramatic development in a science-fantasy, time-travel based show.
Date of Tardis Departure and Return: 1890
In 1890, her youngest child would have been nineteen or twenty, so the moment where she steps into the Tardis wouldn’t be haunted by the spectre of abandoning a young child. Since Doctor Who was revived, the show has been less reliant on the idea that the Doctor can’t control the Tardis well enough to return his companions to their everyday lives with pinpoint accuracy: most of his recent companions have been able to join the Doctor for adventures and return more or less to the exact moment they left and resume their everyday life. Still, there’d be something a bit off about Rhoda Strong going on a dangerous adventure away from Scuffletown if there was any chance of leaving a small child alone. Leaving in 1890 introduces a chance for a kind of “dramatic turn” in her life as a result of getting out into a wider universe.
Story Role
I think it’s pretty easy to see Rhoda Strong later in her life as an independent, decisive and multi-talented person who might also have some powerful and contradictory feelings about violence, rebellion and abuse of authority that would play into many of the revived Doctor Who’s regular narratives. In 1890, she would have had a long time to think about the Lowry War and what it cost her family and community—but also about the righteousness of what they were fighting for in an era where Lumbee identity was in some ways more threatened and precarious than ever. Doctor Who’s companions serve a number of roles in the show: they ground and humanize the titular character’s alien sensibility, they act as the Doctor’s conscience (while also often being put in peril to catalyze the Doctor’s actions), and they force the Doctor to explain what’s going on (essentially serving as audience surrogates). The best versions act as counterweights to the Doctor by having compelling interests and perspectives of their own—which is one reason that I think the show is so hampered by making most companions be contemporary British citizens, given how rich a tapestry ought to be available in a wider historical framework.
Dramatic Arc
I think there’s a really fun and compelling story to be told using a fictionalized Rhoda Strong Lowry regarding Henry Berry Lowry’s disappearance. Maybe that’s a major part of her arc—she doesn’t know any more than anybody else what happened to him and she wants to know. Maybe that’s the first thing she finds out by stepping in the Tardis—that at least Henry Berry didn’t die, that he did in fact leave, but maybe there’s a mystery there that can involve time travel, aliens, and other Doctor Who conventions. But I’d hate to have an individual as interesting as Rhoda Strong be defined only by her interest in finding out what happened to her (in)famous husband, so I think her living into her identity as The Queen of Scuffletown could be another big part of her adventure on the show—fully achieving her name of “Strong”, so to speak.