Anacostia

Anacostia takes its name from Nacotchtank settlements on the river of the same name, in what is now southeastern Washington, D.C. Archaeology shows Indigenous settlement near the river going back at least four thousand years. The Nacotchtank were an Algonquian-speaking people tied to the Piscataway, and they drew fish from the rivers and grew corn, beans and squash on the flat land inland. Before European colonization, the Nacostine villages were a lively trade center visited by peoples from distant regions, including the Iroquois of New York.

Captain John Smith sailed up the river in 1608, mistaking it for the main stem of the Potomac, and met the Anacostans. In the early 1620s a party of colonists seeking corn from the Nacotchtank came to blows with them, and the young Henry Fleet, the only survivor, lived among them for years. After Maryland was founded in 1634, Leonard Calvert named Anacostan as one of the three best places in the colony for trading with Native peoples. Tobacco planting, disease and war soon pressed on the Nacotchtank: around 1668 war pushed neighbouring Native communities northward, and Anacostine Island appeared on a map drawn two years later. By 1697 the survivors had taken refuge among the Piscataway.