"Patowmack" not "Potomac"? Blame George Washington

Including some history of Washington's dream for the river and its canals

One thing all kids who grew up in Chicago used to know was that the original name of the city was “Checagou” or “Chicagoua,” and allegedly meant “smelly onions” in the dialect of the Illinois or Miami. Ever since, I’ve sought out the etymology of modern names derived from American Indian languages. “Potomac” is a particularly rich one, and it’s worth a brief digression to consider why Charles Fierer used a less-common spelling of the river for the name of his newspaper, The Patowmack Packet.

The river we today call the Potomac received its name from one of the Indian tribes that lived along its course, the Patawomeke. The ur-text on the river in English is from none other than Captain John Smith, who may not have been the first European to have entered the river, but is by far the most famous. Smith arrived in Jamestown in 1607, and in June and July of the following year voyaged through much of the Chesapeake Bay in a small shallop with fourteen men. On this voyage, the first of two to explore the Chesapeake, Smith entered the Potomac and sailed nearly 140 miles upriver, to near Little Falls, where the tidal river ends and boats can no longer navigate. Even today, Smith’s feat inspires awe, and he probably saw more of the Chesapeake region than almost anyone else has in the four centuries since his journeys.

As Katherine Boldt notes in a nice article on the etymology of “Potomac,” the Patawomeke tribe were allies of the larger Powhatan Confederacy that dominated today’s eastern Virginia. The Patawomeke lived along the southern shore of the river, near the where the Northern Neck joins mainland Virginia (not far from Fredericksburg). Well-located along the Potomac fall line for exchange with tribes both inland and on the tidewater, the Patawomeke’s name in Algonquian “is a verbal noun meaning ‘something brought,’ and as a designation for a place, ‘where something is brought…”, according to the distinguished historian Frederick Gutheim, in his authoritative The Potomac (p. 28). The Patawomeke and other tribes along the Potomac were part of an extensive trading network stretching all the way up to French Canada. Smith’s Jamestown soon depended for its survival on this trade network, particularly with the friendly Piscataway Indians who sought allies to protect them from the Powhatans, who dominated the lower tidewater, and the aggressive Susquehannocks, to the north.

Smith chose the small tribe’s name to refer in general to the river, though at other places along its course it was known by different names. Boldt quotes Smith’s brief description in his famous 1612 account, A Map of Virginia: “The fourth river is called Patawomeke and is 6 or 7 miles in breadth. It is navigable 140 miles, and fed as the rest with many sweet rivers and springs, which fall from the bordring hils. These hils many of them are planted, and yeelde no lesse plenty and variety of fruit then the river exceedeth with abundance of fish.”

(John Smith’s map of Virginia, with Patawomeke tribe at bend of river at top of map)

From that slight start, the variations on “Patawomeke” became legion in the days when the orthography of English was far looser than now. Early maps of Washington labeled the river as “Potomack,” sometimes dropping the ‘c’ or the ‘k’; others referred to it as “Potawmack,” “Potomeck,” and the like. According to the Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson struck off the ‘w’ in “Potowmac” on Pierre Charles L'Enfant's 1791 manuscript plan for the city of Washington (clearly visible on the LOC’s scan of the map below, if you go to the source). Jefferson’s preference became standard, and as Boldt notes, despite the existence of no less than ninety-five variants into the 20th century, the official naming of the river took place in 1930, when the U.S. Board on Geographic Names settled on “Potomac.” For those interested in the river’s history, Gutheim’s 1949 book remains an enjoyable, if now somewhat outdated, read.

There is no way to know why Charles Fierer, founder of The Times, and Patowmack Packet chose the variant spelling he did. In 1789, when he started the paper in Georgetown, “Patowmack” was less-commonly used than other spellings, though certainly not unknown.

The explanation may lie with none other than George Washington, which takes us away from orthography and into economics and politics. Familiar since his youth equally with the upper reaches of the Potomac and with lands beyond the Alleghenies, Washington’s long-held dream was to connect the Potomac with the Ohio River Valley and make it the nation’s main transportation artery for trade goods, from beyond the Alleghenies down to the Chesapeake and out into the Atlantic. This would help turn the area near Washington’s plantation into the most economically vibrant of the new country, while also improving the economic potential of land held in the Ohio Valley by investors like himself (Washington eventually would own over 30,000 acres in the region). For those interested in Washington’s post-Revolutionary plans for the Potomac, Joel Achenbach’s The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West, is a relatively recent account.

The Potomac also played into Washington’s political concerns for the new country. He feared that if the Ohio Valley territory were not connected economically to the eastern seaboard, the settlers, who “were upon a pivot,” as he wrote in 1784, would over time become estranged from the United States. He assumed those who crossed the Alleghenies would, if left to their own devices, gravitate towards the Mississippi, and eventually either form their own country or ally with the Spanish or British. Linking the Potomac with the Ohio Valley was a critical way to ensure that those who settled the valley remained in identity and interest Americans, as well as a means of avoiding permanently hemming in the United States east of the Appalachians.

Nature was an obstacle to Washington’s plan, as the only way viably to connect the Potomac with the Ohio Valley required circumventing the Potomac at several points, the most difficult of which was the treacherous cataracts along the fall line at Great Falls and Little Falls, before reaching the river’s tidal flow near Georgetown. That meant a canal. Washington faced a daunting problem, however, as no canals existed in the United States at the time and no American had ever built one.

Undeterred, at the end of 1784 he brought together representatives from Maryland and Virginia and spurred the formation of the Patowmack Canal Company, the first in the nation, and soon served as its president (that the agreement between Virginia and Maryland over navigation and trade on the Potomac ultimately led to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia is a fascinating, if diverting tangent). Tobias Lear, Washington’s personal secretary, wrote an informative pamphlet in 1793 on the company and its plans for improving the river, “Observations on the River Potomack.” He noted the variety of products from the interior that could be brought down the river, from “wheat, tobacco, Indian-corn or maize, rye, oats, potatoes, beans, peas,…[h]emp and flax…timber…limestone” and even iron ore and coal, while the river itself was rich in shad and herring. In Lear’s telling, it would be the Potomac and its trade that would make Washington a flourishing city, not the fact that it was to be the seat of the new federal government.

Construction of the Patowmack Canal began in 1785, consisting of five separate canals and locks. The most challenging part was the section designed to skirt the Great Falls, where the Potomac drops 76 feet in less than a mile. Once past Great Falls, the canal would enter the river above Little Falls, which is the last of the cataracts, then link with the Little Falls Canal on the Maryland side before ending in Georgetown. Six locks were planned for the Great Falls, three at the Little Falls. They were intensive engineering projects for the time, given the lack of any canal builders in the States, and took seventeen years fully to complete. The Patowmack Canal was plagued throughout its existence by financial hardship, and though it opened fully in 1802, it soon was overshadowed by New York’s Erie Canal. The Patowmack Canal Company went bankrupt and ceased operations in 1828, being bought by the new Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company, which promptly abandoned the canal to nature.

All that was in the future, though. In the heady days of 1789, it is hard to imagine that Charles Fierer, living in Georgetown, was unaware of the company’s existence or its ambitious plans to have George Washington’s Patowmack Canal join the town with the upper river and ultimately with the far-away Ohio Valley. It is not surprising that he might have latched on to that spelling for his budding newspaper, given the importance of the project and General Washington’s prestige. So even though in his own extensive correspondence (available at Founders Online), Washington himself normally used “Potowmack” or “Potomack,” Fierer’s new broadsheet adopted “Patowmack.”

As to the rest of the planned newspaper’s name, “packet” was not only a term used for periodicals of the time, such as the long-running Pennsylvania Packet, it also referred to the small boats used for hauling goods and passengers along canals (alternatively known as canal boats), as they would soon do on the Potomac. What better way to link his publishing venture with the bold aspirations of the greatest living American as well as the future prospects of the town in which he lived? And so, as was Fierer’s paper so is this blog the “Patowmack Packet.”

Further reading: The best book on the Patowmack Canal Company is Robert J. Kapsch’s Potomac Canal: George Washington and the Waterway West (West Virginia University Press, 2007).

(Image of John Smith’s map of Virginia from the Library of Congress, with hat tip to Katherine Boldt; L’Enfant’s plan, with Jefferson’s emendations, from the Library of Congress; Patowmack Company logo from National Park Service; Patowmack Canal locks from Virginia Department of Historical Resources.)