Powhatan

V-49

In this vicinity is believed to be the birthplace of Wahunsunacock, better known as Powhatan. A village stood nearby that also bore the name Powhatan. By the time the English arrived in 1607, Powhatan was acknowledged as the paramount chief of about 30 districts, with more than 150 villages. His dominions, called Tsenacomoco, stretched approximately to the Potomac River in the north and to the fall line of the rivers to the west, and from just south of the James River eastward to the Atlantic Ocean. Powhatan played a leading role in early relations between the English and the Virginia Indians and was the father of Pocahontas. He died in April 1618.

Department of Historic Resources, 2005

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Keith Egloff & Deborah Woodward, First People: The Early Indians of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992); John A. Garraty and Mark Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 23 vols. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University, 1999), 17:797-798; Ralph Hamor, “A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia,” in Edward Haile, ed., Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony, The First Decade: 1607-1617 (Champlain, Va.: Roundhouse, 1998), 792-807; Jamestown National Historic Sites Archives File (47-09), DHR; Helen C. Rountree and E. Randolph Turner, III, Before and After Jamestown (Gainesville, Fl.: University of Florida, 2002); Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries (Norman, Okla. and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990); “Samuel Argall to Hawes, June 1613,” in Edward Haile, Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony, The First Decade: 1607-1617(Champlain, Va.: Roundhouse, 1998), 752-753; E. Randolph Turner, III and Antony F. Opperman, Searching for Virginia Company Period Sites: An Assessment of Surviving Archaeological Manifestations of Powhatan-English Interactions, A.D. 1607-1624 (Forthcoming).