Nottoway

The Nottoway, who call themselves Cheroenhaka, were an Iroquoian-speaking people of the Virginia Piedmont, settled along the Nottoway River in palisaded towns where women raised corn, beans and squash. Nottoway is an Algonquian exonym. The English explorer Edward Bland first met them in 1650, when they numbered perhaps four or five hundred in three towns.

In 1680 their representative signed the Treaty of Middle Plantation, making them tributaries of Virginia; settler encroachment and disease drove them south between 1681 and 1694. After the Tuscarora War of 1711 to 1715 some followed the Tuscarora north; those who stayed retained two tracts by treaty in 1713, then sold the land.

By 1808 only seventeen survived in Virginia. By 1820 only three elders spoke their language, when Chief Edith Turner supplied words to John Wood for Thomas Jefferson; Albert Gallatin published about two hundred and seventy-five words in 1836.