Transportation and Settlement

Below the falls of the Rappahannock River, this area was an important meeting point long before Europeans arrived, where Algonquian peoples from the East and Siouan speakers from the West, skilled in using local waterways, gathered. The high ridge served as a lookout over the river and a place for crafting quartz tools such as projectile points. Capt. John Smith reached this spot in 1608 and may have marked it by placing a bras cross on a tree trunk or carving a cross in the bark; that year he wrote of setting up crosses and carving names in trees, and his map of Virginia shows a pair of Maltese crosses marking where he reached the fall line, one believed to have been near this location. Hoping to find a route to the Pacific Ocean, Smith was stopped when he could not get his boat over the rapids. The Rappahannock later attracted European settlers, who used its water to power mills and to ship goods to Europe from the busy harbor at Falmouth. Joseph B. Ficklen, who bought Belmont in 1824, operated several mills here, and remnants of the canal that supplied water to his mills in Falmouth remain visible along this trail. Artifacts found on the Belmont property include a Halifax projectile point from the Middle Archaic Period, about 3500 to 2500 B.C., when people hunted and gathered, moved often as resources became available, and had not yet adopted agriculture, pottery, or larger permanent villages. Its broken tip suggests it was attached to spears or throwing darts for hunting. Other artifacts are bifaces, sharpened by removing stone from both sides; such tools were common in different periods, and the larger may have been hafted as an ax while both could also have been used by hand for cutting and scraping materials such as animal skins and plants.

Falmouth, Virginia · United States