The native people of the Chicacone Village…the Nanticokes

For at least 2,500 years before Europeans arrived, Eastern Woodland Indians lived across the forested Delmarva Peninsula, establishing long-term settlements near water and seasonal camps tied to food sources. Among the many tribes there were the Algonquian-speaking Nentego, or Nanticokes, the largest tribe on the Eastern Shore, living in a matrilineal hunter-forager-farming culture. John Smith’s 1608 voyage around the Chesapeake Bay identified one of their largest villages, ruled by the Nanticoke “Emperor,” in the area of Chicone Creek and Vienna. The Nanticokes used wood, stone, bone, and clay, hunted deer, turkey, turtle, fish, and shellfish, grew beans, corn, and squash, and gathered nuts, berries, and roots such as tuckahoe and cattail, with men primarily hunting and women gardening and foraging. By the mid-1600’s, European demand for land forced tribes from much of their traditional homelands into reserved areas created by colonial authorities, and Nanticokes living along the Nanticoke River were pushed north from ancestral lands, with some eventually joining the Iroquois Confederacy. In 1678 Maryland’s Proprietary formally acknowledged several Eastern Shore town sites or informal reservations, including the nearby Nanticoke “Emperor’s” village of Chicone, while honoring existing land patents; Thomas Taylor, a licensed trader and military officer, had already obtained a 700-acre patent there in 1665 called Handsell and built a trading post. In 1698, after increasing English encroachment and complaints by the Nanticokes, Christopher Nutter purchased Handsell and became trader-interpreter, but tensions continued as settlers built nearby and the Maryland Assembly passed an act establishing reservation lands at Chicone Indian Town. In 1723, after Captain John Rider acquired Handsell, he claimed the Chicone Reservation land deserted except for William Ashquash, son of the late Nanticoke Emperor, drove Ashquash off, burned his cabin, and built his own house; when the Indians returned from seasonal migration, they re-established residence and burned Rider’s house, and Maryland authorities ruled that Rider was trespassing. Continued English violations of reservation rights led the Nanticokes to keep abandoning Chicacone town, and in 1768 the Maryland legislature authorized purchase of all remaining rights to Chicone lands from the Nanticokes. By 1769 all former Nanticoke reserved lands had passed to Europeans, and in the 1770’s Henry Steele became sole owner of the Indian Towne Purchase. The long history of Eastern Woodland Indian culture in what is now Maryland reaches back thousands of years, but disease, conflict, and assimilation erased much of that heritage within one or two generations, leaving it often obscure and remembered mainly in place names.

Maryland · United States