The First Virginians

As the grip of the ice-age loosened and temperatures became warmer, a small group moved east into Siberia. Continuing on until 35,000 years ago they encountered a fertile one-hundred-mile wide land mass between Asia and North America where woolly mammoth and grasslands were in abundance, a site today known as Beringia, the route credited for migration into America. There they were stopped by the Wisconsin Glaciation Ice Age causing a 15,000-year layover.

About 20,000 years ago the ice age in North America retreated to allow Beringans to skirt the Pacific Ocean shore-line and move on into North and South America.

One group arrived in Virginia 18,000 years ago. In the 1980’s remains of the Pre-Clovis Indian culture were discovered at a site on the Nottoway River in Sussex County called Cactus Hill.
In another discovery a few years later their advanced civilization was clearly revealed. Two miles west of Bluemont VA, concentric stone circles of rocks, weighing more than a ton, had been placed to mark solar events. It is the oldest man-made structures in North America still in existence with more features than Stonehenge and twice as old. At different times in the year the Pe-Clovis Indians visited here for ceremonial services.

From the hill country of Virginia, the Pre-Clovis Indians spread out with groups moving into the Atlantic coastal region living in peace for many thousands of years. They built villages from North Carolina to Nova Scotia. Called Eastern Woodland Indians, those along the Cape Henry coast became known as the Chesepian Indians, a name used for the Chesapeake Bay, “Great Shellfish Bay." By the end of the sixtenth century, Virginia had reached a total population of 50,000 Indians.

Eighteen thousand years ago when the climate began to warm the Atlantic Ocean began to rise from the Virginia shoreline then 32 miles east of its current location. Over the next thousand years the Chesapeake Bay began to form as waters flooded into the main channel of the Susquehanna River valley to form a narrow estuary. After the last cold snap 8,200 years ago the Atlantic Ocean proceeded to rise rapidly and by 7,000 years ago the shoreline of the Atlantic was about 3 miles from its present shoreline. The Chesapeake Bay was now taking on its characteristic as a "drowned river valley." From 7,000 years ago to the present ocean levels rose more slowly.

In 1667 the only entrance into the Lynnhaven River from the Chesapeake Bay was by way of Little Creek and was a tedious east-west journey of three miles. Adam Keeling, whose plantation was situated east of Thoroughgood’s property and just east of the mouth of the present day Lynnhaven River, organized a group of people in the summer 1667 to dig a small pilot channel from the Lynnhaven River through a huge sandbar about a half-mile long to the Chesapeake Bay. Then almost immediately thereafter on August 27, 1667 a hurricane struck the area and enlarged the ditch to the size of an inlet.

In about 1570 young Powhatan (1547 – 1618) inherited the leadership of about 4-6 Algonquian tribes, and through diplomacy and force, he assembled a total of 30 tribes, about 13,000 Indians, into a Powhatan Confederacy, stretching from modern-day Alexandria to the James River. The Chesepians refused to be part of this confederation, and, as a result, the strongest tribe in Powhatan's confederation, the Nansemond, started whittling away at the Chesepians.

On the morning of April 26, 1607, the Jamestown Settlers arrived at Cape Henry, destined to be the first permanent English settlement in the new world. They found the local population healthier, better fed, and more secure with better sanitation than the English. For example, the Virginia Indians bathed once a day compare to the Colonists who bathed infrequently.

After more and more Europeans started coming to the American continent, the Indian population began to plummet. Eurasian diseases such as influenza, pneumonic plagues, and smallpox, in combination with conflicts with the European newcomers, the Indian population dropped from 50,000 in Virginia to 2,000 by 1700.