Native American Names on the Eastern Shore
Place names occupy a unique juncture between language, geography, and history, so it’s no wonder people find them fascinating. Maryland’s Eastern Shore has an interesting mix of place names that tells us something about the territory and those who lived here.
As elsewhere across America, places are named for early settlers, for where they came from, from local geographic features, for industries important to the area, even for the emotions they aroused in some early visitor.
We find all these categories on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Descriptive names, drawn from a feature of the landscape or natural surroundings, include Ocean City, Still Pond, Piney Neck, Chesapeake City, and dozens more. Centreville and Marydel — a small town straddling the Maryland/Delaware border — are minor variants on the theme, drawing their names from their location.
Smith Island, Kennedyville, and Preston honor early settlers or prominent residents. I take a bit of pleasure in knowing that Smithtown, in Kent County, is named for the carpenter who built many of the first houses there — Hyland Pennington Smith, one of my ancestors.
Other place names draw on settlers’ nostalgia for home, mostly in the British Isles. It’s no surprise to find Kent, Worcester, Somerset, Dorchester, Cambridge, and Oxford sprinkled around the Shore; they’re a little memory of home from the earliest English explorers and colonists. English history also played a role, with names such as Queen Anne’s, Princess Anne, Kingstown, and even Caroline County — named for Lady Caroline Eden, the wife of Maryland's last Colonial-period governor.
The original Native name was often lost to history after colonists gave it a name in their own language. Not so with the Bohemia River in Cecil County, named by Augustine Herrman after his native region in Czechoslovakia. The original inhabitants, the Susquehannock people, called it the Oppoquimimi River – though the meaning of that name is not recorded.
And that leads us to the most distinctive category of Eastern Shore place names: those derived from the language of the people who lived here before the arrival of the English — or any other Europeans. Native Americans on the Eastern Shore spoke local variations of the Algonquian family of languages, a large group that stretched from the Atlantic coast north into Canada, south to Tennessee, and west as far as the Rocky Mountains. The predominant dialect in the immediate area was Nanticoke, a language now considered lost, but in its time spoken by the Choptank, Matapeake, and Assateague — tribal names now preserved in Eastern Shore place names.
Other tribal names also survive as place names. “Assateague,” for example, is the name of a tribe in Virginia. But it also means “swift water” in the native language. Which came first? The answer is lost in the mists of time.
Monie Creek, in Somerset County, also takes its name from a small tribe that lived there before the Colonial era. And of course, the Nanticoke River takes its name from the tribe of the same name, one of the most important in pre-Colonial times. “Nanticoke” means “tidewater people.”
What we know of these native languages was originally recorded by people who were not trained linguists, although some of them undoubtedly had learned a little Latin and Greek in school, and some also had a smattering of modern European languages other than English. Upon hearing a word in the native language, most of these early scribes did their best to write it down as if it were an English word — although in the earliest days, before anyone had thought of creating a dictionary, even English spelling was somewhat haphazard. And unfortunately, the Native Americans of this region had not yet developed writing, so the only way words and phrases were preserved was orally.
Only after the Colonial period, when the native languages were already dying, were there more serious attempts to record them. For example, in 1792, William Vans Murray, a congressman from Maryland, at the request of Thomas Jefferson compiled a list of about 300 Nanticoke words from a native speaker in Dorchester County. In 2007, Nanticoke descendants in Millsboro, Del., initiated a project to revive the language, based on Murray’s list. About 150 other words were recorded around the same time from Nanticoke members who had moved to Canada. But with such a small vocabulary list, the meaning of some of the place names in the original language is open to interpretation.
The name “Chesapeake Bay” is a good example of what happens when amateur linguists record an unfamiliar language. The Algonquian word — most likely something like “tschiswapeki” — reportedly means “mother of waters,” or “shellfish water,” or “great salt bay.” These different interpretations, while undeniably appropriate, may reflect a variety of answers explorers received when they asked native speakers what the word meant (possibly mispronouncing it in different ways, as well). This problem is common in the translation of place names.
A similar story is the Chicamacomico River in Dorchester County; either of two Algonquian words could be the source of the name. “Tschikenumiki” translates as “place of turkeys,” but some scholars suggest it derives from combining “ahkamikwi” and “kehtci-cami” to mean “dwelling place by the big water.”
Several other bodies of water have names derived from native languages. “Choptank” is an Anglicized version of an Algonquian expression meaning “it flows back strongly,” possibly referring to the upstream flow of the incoming tide. Both the name of a river and a county, “Wicomico” comes from the Algonquian “wicko mikee,” meaning “place where homes are built”; it may be the answer an explorer got when he asked a native the name of his village. And “Pocomoke” has been translated as either “broken ground’’ — referring to the farming practices of the local people — or “black water,” referring to the river’s dark color caused by acid from the bald cypress trees growing along it. But it was definitely an Algonquian word.
The Manokin River in Somerset County also derives its name from a native word referring to digging. As with “Pocomoke,” it may refer to the farming practices of the original inhabitants.
Other Native American place names relate to characteristics of their locality. The Honga River in Dorchester County is an estuary along the Atlantic flyway, and like many other Shore waterways, it is a stopping-off place for large numbers of migrating Canada geese. “Honga” is an Anglicized version of “kahunge,” an Algonquian word for “goose.” Quantico Creek, in Wicomico County, may mean “long tidal stream,” although some scholars trace the name to another word meaning “dancing place.” And Nassawango Creek, which flows into the Pocomoke, gets its name from a native word meaning “between streams” or “between land.”
Also in Wicomico County are Rewastico Creek and Rewastico Pond. “Rewastico” reportedly means “lake of white deer.” A Nanticoke tribal legend says that a sacred white deer lived there. When a French hunter killed an albino deer nearby, an epidemic struck the Nanticoke tribe. Looking at the legend scientifically, it’s likely that killing the deer had nothing to do with the epidemic, which was probably caused by viruses brought by the Europeans. While white or albino deer are comparatively rare, there are still a few on the Shore, including recent sightings in Kent and Wicomico counties.
This sampling of Eastern Shore place names derived from Native American languages is necessarily incomplete — we’d love to hear from readers who know of other native place names. Feel free to send us a message. This colorful chapter in local history and geography deserves to be better known.
Peter Heck is a Chestertown-based writer and editor, who spent 10 years at the Kent County News and three more with the Chestertown Spy. He is the author of 10 novels and co-author of four plays, a book reviewer for Asimov’s and Kirkus Reviews, and an incorrigible guitarist.
© Common Sense for the Eastern Shore, 2024
Title image: Pond at Pickering Creek Audubon Center, Talbot Co. Photo: Jan Plotczyk
