HISTORY OF HAMPTON
AND ELIZABETH CITY COUNTY
Old Kecoughtan, 1607–1619
There are few more picturesque regions in the world than the Peninsula on which the town of Hampton is situated. The wealth of water scenery is of mingled advantage and beauty. On the east, parallel to the coast line of the ocean, stretches the noble basin of the Chesapeake Bay twenty miles wide. On the north are the blue waters of the magnificent York River, and on the south is the great bay called Hampton Roads, into which the rushing James pours its yellow tide. The land is a fertile, sandy, alluvial and remarkably level, and the landscape is beautiful with the silvery windings of Back River, Hampton River, Mill Creek, and Harris’ Creek.
At the arrival of the first white settlers the conditions in this favored region were quite different from conditions elsewhere. While in the rest of Virginia the land was mostly covered with great forests of oak, gum, poplar, hickory, and chestnut, here was an open field of two thousand or three thousand acres or more, quite ready for extensive agricultural operations. The waters around swarmed with crabs and valuable fish, and on the beds beneath the sheet of liquid blue lay great quantities of oysters, clams and mussels. Thus, the means of subsistence were abundant, and we are not surprised to hear that, some years before the English arrived, the region was sometimes the seat of as many as a thousand Indians and 300 wigwams. On account of their numbers the Indians were called Kecoughtans, meaning the inhabitants of the “great town,” but the name Kecoughtan applied more to a region than a collection of buildings. As a region, Kecoughtan was pretty near identical with the modern Elizabeth City and Warwick Counties. It extended perhaps northward along the James as far as Skiffe’s Creek and along the York as far as Pocoson River, averaging from East to West about fifteen miles, and from North to South, between the two rivers five miles.
