Existing comment:
A Park with a Past:
Standing here and looking out toward the river or through the woods, what you see would depend on when you looked. The Chesapeake watershed began to take its present form some 15,000 years ago as glaciers that covered much of North America slowly retreated.
The first people to set food in Maryland -- nomadic American Indians on the hunt -- probably passed near here about 12,000 years ago. People and the Chesapeake Bay have been interacting ever since.
You might have seen a spruce forest and open grasslands then. The climate was colder and wetter. Shorelines were hundreds of feet below today's levels. The Chesapeake Bay was a narrow river, and the Potomac River may have been a babbling brook. Herds of elk, musk ox, and bison, and even woolly mammoths, roamed here.
Two or three thousand years ago, the spruce forest and grasslands were gone, replaced by hemlocks, pines, oaks, and other trees. The large land mammals had moved north or vanished entirely. The climate had grown warmer and drier, and the Potomac was a wide river, filled with water once frozen in glaciers. A village of American Indians probably stood nearby -- if not within the boundaries of the park then somewhere close along the banks of the Potomac or Anacostia rivers. Oysters, clams, crabs, and fish made up a crucial part of the Indians' diet. They also gathered walnuts, acorns, fruit, and berries and hunted deer, bear, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, and geese.
If you were among the first European and African settlers in Maryland in the 1600s, you would have found fields of corn, beans, pumpkins, tobacco, and other crops cultivated by local Indians. They would have spoken in Eastern Algonquian, a language shared by many Indian peoples of Maryland. Any you met would most likely have been Nacotchtanks. They might have offered you food and goods to trade and warned you about enemies to the north, the Susquehannocks. |