It may surprise to some to learn that Port Tobacco’s original name had little to do with the fact that it was a port or that the people living there grew tobacco.
Southern Maryland – What’s in a name?
More than you realize, that’s for certain, especially given that many towns, rivers and roads in Southern Maryland descend from the Algonquin dialect spoken by the Native Americans inhabiting the region when the Calverts stepped off the boat in 1634.
There are, to be more specific, 315 Indian name places in the state of Maryland.
A good portion of those encompass Southern Maryland.
The great Chesapeake Bay, which divides the state, is probably the one folks know best. It translates from kehtc-a-s-apyaki to “great shellfish bay.”
There are a good many more. The fascinating part of names we all know so well: Chaptico, Accokeek, Patuxent, Mattapany (found in at least three Maryland regions and Virginia as well) all translate to things that mean something very different from what they may have been originally interpreted as.
For instance, Native Americans living in the tidewater region spoke the Algonquin dialect, which included a lot of unusual sounds made by clicking the tongue or glottal stops, guttural utterances from deep in the throat. Such language was confusing to the baffled English, who tried as best they could to interpret what their Indian counterparts were telling them.
The funny thing is, the poor confused colonials more often than not, thought the People were telling them the name of a place, when in fact, they were in most cases telling them something unique about the region.
It must have been confusing for the natives as well, who wondered, after a time no doubt, why these newcomers insisted on calling their tribes something they had previously told them to describe the region.
The Choptico Indians—who lived near the present town—and Patuxents, who lived at the bottom of modern-day Golden Beach Road and were said to boast 100 bowmen, along with the Mattapanients whose village stood on land now the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, were all misnomers.
Chaptico, kehtc-api-tekwi in Algonquin, had nothing to do with the people living there at all. The natives who first spoke those glottal-enhanced remarks to an Englishman were trying to convey to them that the bay, which in those days was much more in evidence than the marsh that remains, was a “big broad water.”
Present-day Chaptico Bay dwarfs the original in size and scope. Sadly, agricultural practices, the plow and disc in particular, caused the once deep and thriving waterway to silt over in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
A devastating hurricane in 1933 contributed even more to the deterioration of the once proud waterway. Now it is a deep narrow channel running through hundreds of acres of marshland, until it opens up into a shallow bay with a deeper center that empties into the Wicomico River. In colonial times, the bay that gives the town its name was a deep water port with a landing not far from Christ Church.
The Patuxent Indians must have been equally confused as to why the English kept referring to them as “the little rapid or falls in a stream,” which is what the term actually means.
There are Patuxent references found in St. Mary’s, Charles and Anne Arundel counties, in Laurel, Prince Frederick and Rockville.
Mattapany is another word found in multiple jurisdictions.
The term first appears in the historical record of 1639 as “Mattapany Path” which led from St. Mary’s City to the Indian tribe of the same name living at present-day Pax River.
This is officially the oldest road in the state of Maryland.
Translated from Algonquin as matta, “joined” and apo, “water,” the term basically means “meeting of waters,” which shouldn’t surprise anyone since their tribe lived on the shores of Southern Maryland where the Patuxent River meets the Chesapeake Bay.
References to Mattapany and Mattaponi appear not only in St. Mary’s County, but Prince George’s and Worcester County as well, not to mention several places in Virginia.
Once again, the words were misinterpreted as the name of the tribe when they were only trying to tell the whites that they lived where the waters meet.
No place does this confusion appear more fervently than Wicomico, which is the name of two separate rivers, one on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, another in Southern Maryland, and is the name of a small thoroughfare in southeastern Charles County.
The reason this term appears in three different places in the state simply means that the people living there when the English barged in were trying to tell them it was a nice place to live.
Wigh or wik, representing “pleasant” and accomico “dwelling, village” was the native’s way of telling the whites they liked living there.
There’s a boatload of such instances, really.
Consider Accokeek: a’kwi-a-kiki translates to “where the hill or rising ground is.”
Almost the same can be said for Chicamuxen, also in western Charles County, which means: “there lies the high ground.”
Nanjemoy, which may contain elements of Ojibwa, by contrast means “one goes downward.”
Mattawoman, found in Charles, Prince George’s and on the Eastern Shore, has remnants of not only Algonquin, but Fox and Ojibwa as well, and translates to “where one goes pleasantly.”
That certainly is true today as well.
You have to wonder if someone’s shoe or moccasin got busted when you consider that Piccowaxen—also the name of a middle school in Newburg—translates to “ragged or broken shoe.”
The Piscataways, members of whom still thrive today in Southern Maryland, have a name that actually dissected means, “high passable bank around the bend in a river.”
Pomonkey, also misinterpreted, can be discerned as “river twisting in the land.”
There’s a Tomakokin Creek in St. Clements Bay, a term that means “beaver striking water.”
You can almost hear the native trying to tell the white man what it was he just heard.
Potomac actually means “where goods are brought in” or “landing place for goods.”
Zehiah Swamp appropriately translates as “dense” or “thick.”
In the same sense, Port Tobacco, where Father Andrew White first penned the still unfound Algonquin dictionary in the early to mid-17th century, ironically translates to something that has nothing to do with a port (although the colonial town was a port for many years) or tobacco (which was certainly grown there before and after the English came) but instead means, “a pulling of the water inland.”
Two of my favorite Indian names have nothing to do with the Algonquin language at all, but instead come from terms the whites gave them on their own.
Half Pone Point, near Hollywood in St. Mary’s County, is one such moniker, Pone is considered to be a colonial corruption of the Indian word for bread.
Indian Head, fortunately, has little to do with the oft-repeated legend that the English beheaded some savages and lined the road with their heads on stakes, probably a tall tale, but just simply was given to the land because the first colonists to land there found the land already populated.
Historian J.H. Shannon in 1916 described the town as: “A high wooded point that has been called Indian Head ever since white men found Indians living there.”
Contact Joseph Norris at joe.norris@thebaynet.com
