History of the Powhatan Government
An overlook of the Powhatan government system in historical times including a list of tribal chiefs in the 19th and 20th Century.
An overlook of the Powhatan government system in historical times including a list of tribal chiefs in the 19th and 20th Century.
The following is a chronological outline of archival and physical evidence that Europeans were living in the Southern Appalachians long before the region was officially settled by Anglo-Americans: 1564 – Captain René de Laundonnière named the mountains in Georgia and western North Carolina, Les Apalachiens in honor of the Apalache Indians after an exploration team
Chronology of European Occupancy in the Southern Highlands Read More »
A history of the Powhatan Confederacy showing the geographical boundaries, town names, and history of the confederation of tribes.
Sir William Berkeley was a highly educated courtier in the regime of Charles I, then twice governor of Virginia. As governor, he stacked the Council and House of Burgesses with Royalist planters then institutionalized race-based slavery in 1661 and 1662. Prior to that time in Virginia, Native American and Africans were theoretically forced laborers; legally
Sir William Berkeley and Native American Slavery Read More »
There is no accurate measure of the number of shipwrecks along the South Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, but the number must be in the hundreds or even over a thousand. Also not known is how many shipwrecked sailors and passengers survived in North America during the 1500’s and 1600’s, or how many Sephardic Jews, Muslim Moors and European Protestants, escaping the Spanish Inquisition, landed on the shores of the present day Southeastern United States. Surviving archives, however, do furnish credible evidence of these peoples settling in the interior of the Southeast, while officially England was only colonizing the coastal regions.
The word, “Rickohocken,” appeared suddenly in the discussions of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1644, and was frequently mentioned thereafter until 1684. No word similar to Rickohocken appeared on Virginia maps before 1644, while such southwestern Virginia tribes as the Tomahitan, Saponi and Occaneechi did. The Rickohockens were shown on British maps to control southwestern Virginia, southeastern Kentucky, northeastern Tennessee and northwestern North Carolina until the early 1700s.
Because the peoples of the Netherlands and the United States have always had the warmest of relations, contemporary American historians have typically overlooked the less than benign role that Dutch entrepreneurs played in the early development of the Virginia Colony. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, England and the rebelling peoples of the Low Countries were close allies. The Dutch rebels were dependent on English sea power to maintain access to the North Sea. That was to change.
1607 – Jamestown colony founded. 1609 – Based on the voyage of Henry Hudson, the Netherlands claimed the region in what are now the Middle Atlantic States. Their claim extended from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Massachusetts Bay. First Powhatan War (1610 to 1614) coincides with secret Dutch explorations. (See further: The Indian Wars
A small group of families, whose names are mostly Newton and Green (figs. 40, 41), represent what may be the Indians who are recorded to Potomac creek, an affluent of about eight miles north of Fredericksburg in Stafford County, Virginia. We have not, however, clear proof that these descendants are actually of Potomac identity, although
A brief discussion of the Rappahannock Tribe, a remnant of the Nantaughtacund tribe.
A brief history of the Nansemond Indians who resided at Portsmouth, Bowers Hill, and in general about Dismal Swamp, Virginia. Includes last names of living descendants.
The Chickahominy tribe history offers a problem in its political and social aspects, which seem to have been somewhat different from those of the Pamunkey.
The colonists of Virginia from the early settlement of Jamestown faced numerous conflicts with the Native American tribes who called the land of Virginia their own.
One of the most important of the hitherto little known and unrecognized bands resides below Aylett’s landing, south of Mattaponi River, about a mile inland. The district is called Adamstown from the large number of the Adams family (fig. 20, a). They are citizens and have independent holdings near a large swamp which harbors considerable
For good reasons the Mattaponi Indians may be classified definitely as a branch of the Pamunkey, as such, their history often mirrors theirs.
Of the remnant tribes in Virginia, the Pamunkey have long formed the social backbone. They have retained their internal government, their social tradition and geographical position as the people of Powhatan.
The experience of getting to know Brent Kennedy brought back a memory from the exact same year that Brent discovered his Melungeon heritage – 1988. The loan closing documents for purchasing what my former wife and I thought was a long abandoned “Civil War Era” farm house in the Shenandoah Valley produced two big surprises.
In the vicinity of one of Richmond’s fashionable schools there was often seen on winter afternoons, in the late sixties, a group of young girls, who possessed far more than the usual attractiveness that belongs ever to health and youth. Two, at least, Lizzie Cabell and Mary Triplett, were singularly beautiful. The third, a tall,
The loveliness of Virginia women has been a theme of song and verse. Among the Richmond belles of sixty years ago none were more justly celebrated than that trio known as the Richmond Graces, Sally Chevalier, Fanny Taylor, and Sally Watson. Close companions from early childhood, their unusual beauty as they grew to womanhood brought