Skyline on the Potomac River in D.C. with the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and Arlington Memorial Bridge.
Our Scenic & Historic Rivers: A nature, history, and culture article series
Nicknamed Our Nation’s River, the Potomac is the richest of all rivers in the legends and history of America. Along its banks, the leaders of a new nation were raised. Stirred by cries to “go west young man, go west,” the river was the waterway to answer that calling. It was also a major obstacle to be crossed and journeyed to meet the conflicts that shaped the founding of our new nation. The French and Indian War, Brown’s War, the Civil War, the Oyster Wars, the War of 1812, the pathway west, and the pathway east carrying the resources of a rich land...indeed, the Potomac River is steeped and unparalleled in American history. It has stories to tell.
Surveyed by Peter Jefferson, father of Thomas, to settle a boundary dispute by Lord Fairfax in 1746, the discovered source of the Potomac arises from a spring in West Virginia near the Maryland state line. Its source is marked by a boundary marker called the Fairfax Stone and is now a park. Rising from underground, the tiny spring moves across the Appalachian Mountains and the Piedmont Plateau 405 miles to finally meet the Chesapeake Bay in a mouth 11 miles wide near Point Lookout in Maryland.
It is Maryland’s second longest river (Susquehanna is first) and the Nation’s 21st largest in terms of drainage area at 14,700 square miles. It is probably 3.5 million years old, carving its way through the mountains and depositing sand into the Atlantic Ocean shelf. Today, five million people live within its watershed.
Upper Left: The Fairfax Stone in 1881; marking the corner of Grant and Tucker Counties, West Virginia.Bottom Left: Today, visitors to Fairfax Stone Historical Monument State Park can see the North Branch of the Potomac River emerging from under the famed stone.Upper Right: Passenger boats still ferry visitors along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historic Site in Maryland.Bottom Right: View of George Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon, from the Potomac River.
Top: Sunset view of the Potomac River, from Weverton Cliffs, near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.Bottom: The Great Falls of the Potomac are glacial remnants that create a dramatic barrier to upriver travel.
The Algonquin and Piscataway Indians fished it, hunted it, and lived along the river long before Captain John Smith famously explored it in 1608 looking for the way west to the Pacific Ocean. Smith went 115 miles up the river until he was blocked by the force of falling water tumbling over rock debris—the last glacial remnants we now call Great Falls. He went no farther and neither did anyone else for 100 years.
Separating the colonies of Virginia and Maryland, the tidewater area became the center for grand tobacco plantations that enriched England. All along the Potomac—from Virginia’s northern neck to Maryland at St. Mary’s City—the Washington, Lee, Carter, Monroe, Fitzhugh, Mason, Taylor, Calvert, and Brent families prospered. Never in all of America has one place fostered so many leaders, lawyers, philosophers, heroes, and presidents as the tidewater area of the Potomac. It is the cradle of our republic, raising men and women skilled with horse and agriculture, men and women of strength, courage, and wisdom, and sociability in learning the political ways of rational and respectful relationships. Survival depended on it. The Hatfields and McCoys didn’t belong in tidewater Potomac.
As the land became exhausted, because tobacco was not kind to the soil, the acquisition of more land for farms and plantations ensured the continuation of wealth. Eventually, eyes turned to the land behind the falls. George Washington was one of the first to venture west. He marveled at the land and saw the river as the highway to the Ohio River and even further west. Washington never gave up his vision and pushed for a canal around the falls toward Cumberland that began in 1787.
Above the falls the land was different. Thomas Jefferson—when viewing its vastness at Harpers Ferry—would write “the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge is perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.” Traveling west to Berkeley Springs as he often did with his brother Lawrence, George Washington would describe the river below him from the ridge (along present-day Route 9) as a wild wilderness of beauty.
Though the C&O Canal would follow along the river, with barge traffic heading west and east, the river still maintained spaces of rugged quietude. Today, the canal is a 180-mile National Park and pathway for hiking, biking, and horse riding. The view described by Washington has hardly changed in 200 years.
West of the falls, the land of valleys and ridges was crisscrossed by streams and rivers (now kayak routes for weekend leisure excursions) that joined the Potomac waterway on its journey south and east. Wheat and corn would be grown in the fertile valleys by new German immigrants sponsored by families of the tidewater. Streams provided waterpower for grist mills to grind the flour that made biscuits for new pubs and restaurants in the new farming town centers, such as Hagerstown, Frederick, and the booming new port city of Baltimore.
It was in this area where the ravages of the Civil War took the lives of so many sons of the south and north. Today, visitors can explore the battlefields of the many skirmishes that mark the farmlands, from Shepherdstown through Antietam, and feel the tragedy of lives lost.
The heart of the Potomac is not the tidewater or the farmlands of wheat or the rocky quarry areas and coal mines farther west. They are all parts of America in Miniature. The river’s soul is the Nation’s capital city Washington, D.C. It is not an industrial city. It is as Senator Justin Morrill exhorted it to be in 1866, “a seat of government. In design it must be worthy of our nation.”
Tidal basins and cherry trees. Monuments, museums, architectural delights. The Capital Dome, the Mall, leisure boating centers, and visitors from across the globe look out upon the very river that flows past Mt. Vernon, George Washington’s home—reminding us that the Potomac region was and continues to be unequaled as a school for leadership.
