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Season 1, Episode 8: The Northern Neck
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Dustin Baker
George Washington. It's one of the most recognizable names in the world. His story is a foundational stone in American history. Yet at the place he was born, only remnants remain of the buildings and the stories of people who once lived here. One might think that the birthplace of a national icon is an easy story to tell, but it's actually one of the most complex and surprising historic sites preserved by the National Park Service. So join us as we piece together the past, present and future of this place brick by brick. On this podcast series upon this Land History, mystery and monuments.
The National Park Service was created in the Organic Act of 1916, and it will be turning 108 years old on August 25th of this year. Hi, my name is Dustin Baker and I'm the Chief of interpretation here at George Washington Birthplace National Monument. As of this recording, there are 431 national park units in the United States. When these 431 places became national parks, it also became the Park Service's duty to share their stories that go back thousands of years. Even at sites that are based around historic events like ours, we find that the broader story reaches beyond the boundaries of the park and can reveal the character of our national heritage.
On this episode of our podcast, we want to set the stage for how the Washington story began here and give our listeners a sense of this place. The Northern Neck of Virginia is a peninsula in the Chesapeake Bay, bounded by the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. Who was living here when the Washington story began? What were their lives like? To help us paint the picture, we are joined again by Doctor Phil Levy.
Phil Levy
When the Europeans arrived, they encounter an indigenous population that had been living on these rivers for thousands of years. They'd had a very well structured, efficient, sustainable way of life. They’re people who will come to be called the Algonquians, referring to a language group, a language group that's identifiable all up and down the eastern seaboard, going as far as the upper ends of New England, all the way down to sort of the bottom of Virginia. They’re... they move into the area. I think it's about 4000 years ago, don’t quote me I could be mistaken, but it's right around then. This group of people, so it's called the proto Algonquian, the ones that are sort of not yet the Algonquians. Remember that we don't, we don’t see this stuff in records. We have to piece this stuff together. And it's a bunch of different clues, tell us about this. And one of the most useful ones are their ceramics. At first, indigenous people are using stone tools and making baskets. Baskets are not going to survive well in the archeological record. So in stone tools, well, but stone tools produce a large amount of what's called debitage or flakes. As you, as you break the stone tool downs, a lot of refuse that spalls off as your as you're making your your spear point or arrow point or knife. And that's all very valuable, but it's the advent of ceramics that really start to change things because ceramics have they change over time, and they can be styled very intentionally, and they're valuable for a few different reasons. For one thing, they survive. The indigenous people of the region make large vessels. They make small vessels. There's a whole variety of techniques that go into it. There's some stuff that simple technology like if you're going to make a larger vessel with larger sides, tall sides, you need to make that ceramic, the material stronger, so they can use shell temper and stone in the matrix in the ceramic to give it some strength. But design elements are very, very important, the edges of vessels, the shapes you put at the top or top edges and do you design, how do you design it? Do you incise it? Do you...what kind of designs do you scrape in it. There's a, one of the things they do is, they've a sort of rope net and they'll sort of lay that over and press that in. So some of the vessels have a kind of, almost like fabric like pattern to them. And that's valuable for helping see how people are doing stuff and identify people. But part of what it's doing for us is identifying social groups, because in order to teach someone to do these things. In order to learn these skills, you have to be able to talk with the people. You have to be able to talk to them to teach them, and they have to able to understand you to learn. So as you see a ceramic group, a particular style, up and down the side of the creek or along the river, you're seeing people that are in daily interaction with each other and that can communicate with each other. So a lot of times when we talk about these groups in the pre-contact era, we'll talk about them in terms of their actual ceramic patterns. We'll know them. There'll be a particular type of ceramic come from a particular site, and a group of people will be known by that ceramic. So it's not just imposed on them, they are all in communication with each other. But so they were living on the rivers of Virginia, living along the Potomac and the Rappahannock, which had a close relationship because of the narrowness of the of the Northern Neck peninsula. And there were more villages, along the Rappahannock than they were on the Potomac. But, their using the Northern Neck primarily as their, as their food supply, it's sort of the they have it all very well organized. They seek out areas that are fairly low lying, that give them easy river access. Marshes are very good, and if they can be near a marsh that's advantageous because marshes are good for food supplies. Then the upper land between, is is fine for hunting. So you have deer and all of the other regional animals there that are ready access. There will also be farms. They'll, you know, the lots of farming of corn and squash going on. So that combination, but then also, harvesting, seasonal oysters is a big deal. And one of the things that that does for us, archeologically is, remember there’s thousands of years of people doing this. There are habitual gathering sites because that's where the big oyster beds are. So they come back year after year. And as they gather those oysters, the shells pile up. In some cases for, you know, a thousand years or more, you have, like this mound of shells. Archeologists call them shell middens, but they have other stuff in them as well as shells. But they are wonderful indications of where people's activity was taking place. They dot the rivers. There's, there's there's at least two, I think, on GEWA. They’re, they're all over the place.
Dustin Baker
Hey everyone, this is Dustin cutting in real quick. Just reminding our listeners that GEWA is an acronym for George Washington Birthplace. So when Phil Levy says GEWA, he's referring to the park.
Phil Levy
You have people there seasonally, living seasonally, some people staying all year long, getting away from the village, you know, living in a smaller version of the community. But you would have seeing networks of roads, some of which translate into the English road system, which itself translates into, the current roads. Route three was a Native American path for time immemorial or a version of it. The, the road that goes over Maddox Creek where the Maddox... Maddox bridge, where, William Augustine Washington's store was, that's an old Indian path as well. And some of these make their way into records that referred to as an Indian path. But ultimately they’re, so they're moving around. They’re...everything is sort of well tied in. And, they have a variety of relationships with people living to the north and the south, both harmonious and disharmonious. There are Iroquioans who live further north, further up the Susquehanna at the top of the at the top of the Chesapeake and up the Potomac. And they will periodically come down, and there'll be conflict between those northern peoples who kind of quickly can float their way down. One of the things that, because the way the water works is, the, the people who are further north have the advantage of the flow of the rivers so they can move south very quickly. Which allows them to strike raids very quickly and then go back up the river after they've done their damage. But, they're able to make these kind of lightning raids and makes them kind of intimidating. But that's happening. And there's a variety of different relationships between all the different people living along that river. The Patawomeck Indians, the Rappahannocks, who obviously live on the the river that'll come to bear their names. People called the Nanzatico, who are in the area of GEWA, they're, [indecipherable] further down the peninsula. Mostly that tends to refer to villages, which tends to be the name of the village that, the people live in. And where sort of the main leader of the village lives, and then there'll be sort of satellite, smaller villages around, around them. They're sort of part of that family and clan. All in dialog with each other, all sort of connected in a variety of different ways, socially and through trade. So it's a well used, very efficiently laid out area that people have been using in that way for thousands of years. So it's not an empty land, as the English like to imagine it to have been. it's pretty well settled, pretty, pretty efficiently used.
Jonathan Malriat
So now that we've talked about that pre-European side, what is the start of European settlement here? How does it begin, and how does that connect in with the broader Northern Neck and even the broader colonial aspects?
Phil Levy
So we tend to think of, these places as Maryland and Virginia, these two sort of like big entities, and they have colonial histories. Those names go back to the 17th century. So we tend to kind of project them backwards. And when we're talking about the period of the first half of the 17th century, we shouldn't do that. There's a lot of possibility. And, you know, they don't live knowing what the outcomes are going to be. So you get to say with the, the Virginia Company, with what establishes the colony at Jamestown, this group of financiers and, you know, well-connected people in London who pool their money, who bring in other backers who basically contract with, colonists, people to go run an enterprise, and they go and set up, set up their trade for it. Ultimately, they set up a village and, they're supposed to make a profit, supposed to find a way to make money for the company so that the the shareholders can, can make a profit. That project fails pretty quickly, and it's replaced by something else, replaced by something more organized as a colony, less as a commercial venture. But, there's no reason other people can't do that. And there are a lot of people around England at the time who're saying, well I can start a colony. I could start a colonial venture. And England, England’s policy is to sort of just let these people do what they want to do. You have to get papers, you have to get permits. But they're pretty generous in letting people have them. And there's no reason not to be, go start an enterprise. If it works, we'll make some money off of it. If it doesn't, then you bear the cost of it, and it's your problem. So you have little English colonies popping up all over the place. Some of them work, some of them don't. But there are a lot of guys who think, well, you know, maybe I could do a great thing. Maybe I could make a great colony. I could be the leader of a community. I can make a huge amount of money. And you have people like that on the Potomac. There is a colony at Jamestown, and it's, it's got some reach. You know, it has a whole bunch of settlements along the James and even further north, going on to the York and up the, a little bit up the Chesapeake that see themselves as part of that colony, that accede to the rules of that colony. They see themselves as sort of part of that project. But they're other people, other English people starting settlements who don't see themselves as part of that project. They're English people, so they all understand themselves as part of the same larger vision. But they're not necessarily Virginians. So there are a few of them. Maybe one of the one would be a man named John Mottram, who has a colony over a little community, at Coan Creek in Northumberland County and, you know, he's not really a Virginian in the 1640s, 30s and 40s. He's just there. He's he's trading with indigenous people. He certainly relates to Virginia. He's involved with them, but he's kind of his own thing. It's very far away from Jamestown. It's very hard for the reach of authority to fight them on a day to day basis. So he's kind of on his own. And there's a whole period of settlement where, where these little, little towns, these, you know, the plantation is the main unit of measure. And the leader of the plantation is kind of like in charge of a colony. One of the more interesting ones was on, Kent Island, which is up the Potomac. It's sort of near or, sorry, up the Chesapeake, sort of near Annapolis. and that was the fur trade settlement, because as you go up the Chesapeake, you get to the Susquehanna, and the Susquehanna will ultimately take you further to the interior. And so there's a fur trade kind of bringing furs down from more northerly climes and using using Kent Island as an entrepot to then ship them off to England. There’s a lot of money in the fur trade. These are beaver furs, and they're very interested in making that money. And you have a whole community that sets itself up there, complete with, you know, they bring a baker that they bring everything they need to run a small English village. They set up a garrison, a lot of them following the politics of the day. A lot of them, have Puritan sentiments, minister to them. I'm not sure. I mean, more than one. so it's. But it's its own little place that, it understands itself as its own little place. And then you get the Calvert's getting the permits to start a colony, sort of under their own little proprietary colony, meaning it's going to be a family project. But they are going to run, and they're Catholic and their allies are Catholic, and they sort of set up nominally a Catholic colony. The colonists aren't all, Catholic, but the leadership is. And this sort of immediately establishes their relationship with the Catholic Church. So it's it's it's own little thing there, on the north side of the Potomac. Which is a bit of a problem in the eyes of some Virginia planters, some of the people who are running Virginia in the 1630s, because they understand all of that as kind of being in their area of control. And the Kent Islanders who are north of where Maryland was established, they kind of see themselves as sort of allied with Virginia, particularly because of their religious sentiments. They're not too thrilled about there being a Catholic colony. They don't want to be connected to. They don't want to be under the rule of Catholics. So even though they're north of the Potomac, they understand themselves as being part of Virginia. And you've got John Mottram over there kind of being on his own. So you've got all these different little, little groups. So Maryland and Virginia have a little bit of conflict over where the border is going to be, but there's the Colonial Office that's going to make these decisions, that these are ultimately royal matters and they get settled. The Marylanders look at Kent Island and say, well, that's north of the Potomac. That should belong to us. And so there's a conflict. I think it's 1638. There's a conflict between Calvert, and the Kent Islanders and ultimately the Kent Islanders sort of yield. And they kind of fall under the control of Maryland. But they have resentments, and they harbor those resentments. They don't forget. They don't forget that there's an independent identity to, to being a Kent Islander. And some of that is connected to Puritanism. Some of it's just that they were their own. They came to be their own community and sort of were absorbed. And all the while, John Mottram’s kind of running his own show, you know, doing his trading and doing his tobacco. And so, all this might have gone on. I mean, it might have continued this way, with a few more settlements, settlements getting started here. And there's this man named William Claiborne, which was involved with Kent Island, but was involved in almost everything in this phase in Virginia, getting out and acquiring land patents and making alliances. He's another guy who sort of potentially could have been, you know, a major player in his own sort of colonial universe. Everything might have continued that way until England sort of fell into civil strife and, between roughly 1640 and 1650, you've got, a whole upheaval of the British colonial, the British, sorry, national system. You've got a civil war, you've got conflicts between first, at first you have, conflict between Parliament and the king, then war, then ultimately the execution of the king. And, the installation of a new form of government by 1650. It's the, the triumph of the Puritans. The Puritans take control of the entire nation and and those conflicts play themselves out in, in the colonies. They played themselves out also on the Potomac. Maryland, for example, is a prime target because of its Catholicism. So you have a guy named Ingle who sort of leads it comes to Maryland and leads a revolt against, against the Calverts. Who flee, and the whole place falls into into civil strife. Maryland’s a fairly small colony at the at the time. It's only couple hundred people at most. B their plantations are burned, alliances fall apart, new ones new ones are formed, the whole place falls into turmoil. And the Kent Islanders, who were, still harboring their resentment, they remember this, they're involved. And what starts to happen as this all settles out is a group of Marylanders, for one reason or another, there's been a lot of work to try to figure out exactly what they're thinking. It's hard to tell exactly what they're thinking. But they look to the south side of the Potomac and say, we can, we should be over there. We can, we can get away from some of the chaos of Maryland and and the and the way the Calverts try to control things. Sort of, it's sort of like a sort of a one-two punch. The Calvert's have a very controlling interest in people's business affairs, but at the same time, there's a series of rebellions, related obviously, but a series of rebellions that lead to a kind of chaos. And to some of these guys, they look across the river and they see someone like John Mottram, who by that point is, by 1650 that that has become part of Virginia, that that Northumberland County, that's become part of the, part of Virginia. And Mottram, sort of his land was the staging ground against the Calvert's during the troubles of the 1640s. They look to the south and say, if we start up there, we escape the control of the Calvert's and some of the chaos of Maryland and Virginia just looks very stable to them. Suddenly looks like a very calm place. And so a few of them head over. The first person to put a land patent in on, the south side in GEWA is the guy named Henry Brooks, who owned a large portion of the land at the park, where the park is. He was a Kent Islander and came over. A few of the other people who came over, Hercules Bridges was a Kent Islander, and sort of harbored that resentment. About a dozen guys, all former Marylanders who make this migration to the South and kind of start all over again. And one of the most significant for the park story, is a guy named Nathaniel Pope. Pope came to Maryland on his own dime in 1630s, not sure the exact date. If you came with money, you could buy your way into Maryland. You got land and status immediately, as opposed to coming as a servant. Well Pope bought his way in, he appears to have come from Bristol. Seems to have a very strong connections to Bristol. I don't think we have any document that tells us that he's from Bristol, but there is a Pope merchant family operative at the time in Bristol, and he refers to his business interests in Bristol. His son moves to Bristol, so he appears to be very well-connected there. That's presumably where he came from. But he moved in to Maryland, set up of his plantation, immediately got involved in the fur trade. So he had Kent Island connections. His Kent Island connections were so good that during the conflict of the 1640s, as things started to fall apart, Calvert sent Pope to Kent Island to make sure that the Kent Islanders wouldn't join the rebellion against Calvert authority. So he's an he's an ally of the Calverts, but he also has good enough Kent Island connections that he's the he's the Protestant guy they want to send to talk to the Kent Islanders to keep them onside. And it's not clear what happened there, because all this stuff ends up in court afterwards. And people say different things and contradictory things. But somewhere in all of this, Pope seems to say, you know, we could just go to the south side of the Potomac and start all over again. We can get away from this. So he seems like he may be double dealing. Pope, perhaps an interesting figure. Some people have read him as a rebel because because of this. Because we can go across the river and start again. But he's, he's, I read him as a weathervane. It's which way is the wind going? That's where I'm going. So he's, I think, he's a survivor. I don't think he's a rebel. When it's expedient to be on the rebel side, he's on the rebel side, when it is not to be, he isn't. He's, he's loyal to Calvert, but then he seems to be scheming to bring people away from Calvert's authority. But then afterwards, he signs a loyalty agreement once again to Calvert. But all the while he's acquiring land on the southside of the Potomac. So he purchased land or acquired lands, hard to tell exactly the system, because it's happening outside of our gaze. But he appears to be on Maddox Creek, probably up Maddox Creek, somewhere near Maddox Bridge, I believe is where he was living. And he's, he's a big guy who's wealthy enough that he could pay his way into the colony, and he's got a network of allies. And so finally, he shifts locations, we see in the mid 1650s reference to him being on the south side. And then at some point, he's of the south side. By 1658, Westmoreland County is its own county, separate from, Northampton County, ah, from Northumberland County. And and Pope is sort of the big man in the area. But still, I think it's best to see Pope in the same way we would see someone like Mottram or William Claiborne. Someone who's like, I'm going to be a big guy, I’ll start my own place, you know, I'll be a governor. I'll, you know, I'll have nice clothes and all that stuff. I think that's how he's seeing himself. It doesn't quite happen that way for him, but there's no reason to think that he's thinking any differently. He's just, he's an adventurer, and his story turns dramatically because he's he's aging by 16, you know, 57. And, the, by the time Westmoreland County becomes its own county and joins Virginia, sort of initially as part of, Northumberland, but then separates out. It's now really, these colonies are gradually, sorry these counties, these these colonial settlements are getting absorbed into the Virginia system. And I think that the reason the planters wanted that was they wanted the stability. Maryland was chaotic. And I think that the scars of the experience of Maryland stay with them. There's evidence for this. The Maryland families continue to marry one another. So there is this, even if they never refer to themselves as former Marylanders, there are family alliances that start to take shape on the Potomac that reflect the fact that the people had come from Maryland. So they seem to retain some sense of themselves. and what Virginia gives them is, is a stable court system, a stable government system. So they're able to conduct their business without a lot of, without a lot of worry of chaos. What you want, and it's very important to these people, you want to know that your debt, the debts to you will be honored and that there's a system for ensuring that, that you will get the money you are owed. And that's sort of a mutual thing. You know, I want to know that your debts to me are going to be paid, and you want to know that my debts to you are going to be paid. So when they see, and you need that for commerce to work effectively, so they're perfectly happy in some sort of Hobbesian way to, to sacrifice some of their freedom in order to have good, strong government systems that they can rely on. And of course, these big men, they all become the leaders of the, of the county anyway. So in their own way, they do kind of fulfill that dream of becoming the big men. They're just the big men of a county, which they basically run. So it works very well for them. The Virginia system also is sort of clever in that it enables the creation of new counties very easily. You just need to have, by the time as we spread out, we get further and further away from the county court. We all need to go to the county court all the time. That's what we conduct our affairs, our land patents have to be certified, our debts to one another have to be handled in court. So we always want to get to court. But as people move further and further afield, it gets harder and harder to go to court because of the distance. Likewise, the church, which is often near the court and eventually, now that a group of people live further away, they all look at one another and say, well, let's just let's get our own court, let's start our own county. And so Virginia counties proliferate that way, through the expansion, of the settlement. It's not like that New England, in New England its very hard to start a new county. They don't want you going off into, you know, the hinterlands and starting over again. They want to have more control, whereas in Virginia, more more land is more Virginia, more tobacco, it works fine for them. So that's sort of what happens. You also have at the same time people coming, you know, as more and more people are coming into Virginia, you have people coming, people who are Virginians, English Virginians who are coming, we could say sort of from the south into the Northern Neck. So the population of the Northern Neck at this period ends up being a combination of Virginians or, sorry, English people who who come of through Virginia into the into the Northern Neck counties, and Marylanders who are coming south and particularly, that matters particularly for GEWA. Doesn't matter for everywhere in the Northern Neck. But it's terribly important for GEWA because in 1657, John Washington is going to arrive and he's going to float right into Nathaniel Pope's world and just walk right into that and within three years of that, Nathaniel Pope will pass away, and John Washington basically takes over. And so he walks right into that Maryland echo world and becomes the new Nathaniel Pope. So very advantageous situation for him, but all rooted in this sort of this chaos of the first half of the 17th century.
Dustin Baker
Thank you for listening to this episode of Upon This Land History, Mystery and Monuments. On our next episode, we're going to continue the conversation with Doctor Phil Levy, and we're going to segue into the beginning of the Washington story here with John Washington.
Description
Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but sometimes those three pieces are not enough. On this episode of our podcast, we set the stage for how the Washington story began here. Who was living here before the arrival of John Washington in 1657? What were their lives like? Even at national parks that are based around historic events like ours, we find that the prologue can reveal important parts of our national heritage.
Date Created
08/31/2024
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