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    Occoquan
    Occoquan
    Occoquan
    Ebook192 pages59 minutes

    Occoquan

    By Earnie Porta

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    About this ebook

    Although Native Americans have lived along the banks of the Occoquan for thousands of years, John Smith was the first European to visit the area, arriving at the river s mouth in 1608. Here he encountered the Dogue Indians, from whose language the river and town take their names. With the coming of settlers, Occoquan s location at the meeting of the Tidewater and Piedmont made it ideal for water-related industry and commerce. By the end of the 18th century, it boasted one of the first automated gristmills in the nation. During the Civil War, Occoquan housed both Union and Confederate troops and was the sight of several small engagements. In 1972, the river, which had provided so many commercial and recreational benefits, revealed a more dangerous side as flooding from Hurricane Agnes caused severe damage. The people of Occoquan rebuilt, and the town evolved into the wonderful mixture of old and new that gives it the unique character seen today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateNov 22, 2010
    ISBN9781439641521
    Occoquan
    Author

    Earnie Porta

    Earnie Porta is a board member of the Occoquan Historical Society and began his first term as Occoquan�s mayor in 2006. Many of the photographs in this book come from the collection of the Occoquan Historical Society�s Mill House Museum.

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      Book preview

      Occoquan - Earnie Porta

      Society.

      INTRODUCTION

      Yet no place can be more romantic than the view of Occoquan to a stranger, after crossing the rustic bridge, which has been constructed by the inhabitants across the stream. He contemplates the river urging its course along mountains that lose themselves among the clouds; he beholds vessels taking on board flour under the foam of the mills, and others deeply laden expanding their sails to the breeze; while every face wears contentment, every gale wafts health, and echo from the rocks multiplies the voices of the waggoners calling to their teams.

      —John Davis

      Thus in 1801 did the young English sailor-turned-novelist John Davis describe the settlement near the falls of Virginia’s Occoquan River. The community indeed seemed destined for a certain prosperity, and Davis’s description elicited the prediction from a friend that his abode on the banks of the river will make the stream classical in the annals of literary history.

      The Occoquan River is a tributary of the Potomac, and thus part of the 64,000-square-mile Chesapeake Bay watershed. A little more than 26 miles in length, it begins roughly in the center of Prince William County, Virginia, at the confluence of Cedar Run and Broad Run, near what is today the Brentsville Historic Area. On its way to the Potomac the Occoquan drops some 150 feet, with more than half of this drop once occurring over a short series of falls just west of the town that also bears the name. At first traveling in a northeasterly direction, the Occoquan follows a serpentine path that includes almost a dozen sizeable oxbows before it meets its main tributary, Bull Run, about 12 miles into its journey. Here the river begins service as the boundary between Prince William County on the south bank and Fairfax County on the north. Several additional large oxbows occur as the river turns toward the southeast. After 21 miles, it straightens and makes its final run into Belmont and Occoquan Bays, ultimately emptying into the Potomac River.

      Along the river’s course the scouring effects of the Occoquan’s waters have provided clues to the area’s geological past. Just 2 miles west of the river’s mouth, large vertical shelves of hard rock rise above the northern bank, dating from more than 200 million years ago when Virginia and northwest Africa collided and the supercontinent of Pangaea formed. The fall line, marked by narrow, walled valleys with rapids and waterfalls, reflects a more recent epoch. Some 20,000 years ago, the weight of the ice to the north caused a corresponding bulge in the local section of the geologic plate. As elevation increased with the bulge, so too did the speed of the rainwater and glacial melt, which rushed over the harder igneous and metamorphic rock, carrying sediment and depositing it in the coastal plain that makes up today’s Tidewater.

      Humans have lived near the Occoquan River for at least 13,000 years. In fact, there are more than 200 documented pre-European sites along the river’s banks from its mouth to its confluence with Bull Run. Jamestown’s Capt. John Smith was the first European known to have visited the area, doing so in 1608 during his exploration of the Chesapeake Bay. At the river’s mouth he encountered a town of the Tauxenent Indians, who later became known to the Europeans as the Dogue. Along their voyage to this point, Smith’s party had encountered hostility from Native American communities affiliated with the paramount chief Powhatan, but the inhabitants at the mouth of the Occoquan treated Smith and his men well. It is from the language of the Dogue that both the river and the town take their name.

      Decades passed before other Europeans followed Smith’s voyage and settled the lands along the Occoquan. In 1651, a traveler on the Potomac spotted the cornfields of the Dogue (variously referred to in the sources as the Taux, Toags, Doags, Doegs, Dogue, and others) separated from the mainland by a swamp. Doeg’s Island became a reference point for some of the land patents authorities granted in blocks of hundreds and thousands of acres along the Occoquan River during the 1650s, 1660s, and 1670s. After playing their part in the Susquehannock War and Bacon’s Rebellion, the Dogue largely disappeared from history. Their lands remained, however, and were soon claimed by English colonists.

      As the decade of the 1680s progressed, activity increased near the river’s mouth. Col. George Mason patented vast lands on the western and southern shores of the Potomac adjacent to the Occoquan for tobacco cultivation. In 1684, the Virginia Assembly required that Mason operate a boat across the Occoquan to ferry the soldiers and horses of the militia. Several years later, European colonists were expanding northward from the lower Potomac in sufficient numbers for the Assembly to deem the fords on the Occoquan unsatisfactory. As a result, in 1691 the boat service at the river became a public ferry linking what was later to develop into Colchester and Woodbridge on the north and south banks, respectively.

      Additional activity in the area followed on the heels of Robert King Carter. At the turn of the century, Carter participated in the latest round of speculation associated with the Occoquan watershed, obtaining in 1707 grants of 10 acres below the fall line and of more than 900 above it. Within the next 15 years, surveyors had laid out grants of land on all the low ground adjoining the Occoquan, Bull Run, Broad Run, and Cedar Run. Attracted by the apparent presence of copper farther north, Carter established a landing below the falls of the Occoquan and pushed a road north to the mines—today’s Ox Road, Virginia Route 123. The mines were never to amount to much, but with the construction of the landings, Carter helped set the area on a path that was to dictate its future for the next century.

      Regional tobacco production played no small role in determining this

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