A Park with a Past

The Chesapeake watershed began taking its present form about 15,000 years ago as glaciers retreated, and the first people in Maryland, nomadic American Indians on the hunt, probably passed near here about 12,000 years ago. At that time the climate was colder and wetter, shorelines were hundreds of feet below today's levels, the Chesapeake Bay was a narrow river, the Potomac may have been a babbling brook, and herds of elk, musk ox, bison, and even woolly mammoths roamed the area among spruce forest and open grasslands. Two or three thousand years ago, the spruce forest and grasslands had been replaced by hemlocks, pines, oaks, and other trees, the large land mammals had moved north or vanished, the climate had grown warmer and drier, and the Potomac was a wide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 or somewhere close along the banks of the Potomac or Anacostia rivers, where oysters, clams, crabs, and fish were a crucial part of their diet, supplemented by gathered walnuts, acorns, fruit, and berries and by hunting deer, bear, turkeys, rabbits, ducks, and geese. By the 1600s, the first European and African settlers in Maryland would have found fields of corn, beans, pumpkins, tobacco, and other crops cultivated by local Indians who spoke Eastern Algonquian, and the people they were most likely to meet here were Nacotchtanks, who might offer food and goods for trade and warn of enemies to the north, the Susquehannocks.

Forest Heights, Maryland · United States