The Potomac's name comes from a village, and its upper reaches meant honking geese
Potomac is a European spelling of Patawomeck, an Algonquian village on the river's southern bank. Native peoples used separate names for different stretches: above Great Falls it was Cohongarooton, honking geese, and below the falls, river of swans. The official spelling was only fixed in 1931.
Captain John Smith explored the river in 1608 and his drawings became a map published in London four years later, labelled Patawomeck as local tribes had told him. Over the next century and a half the name wandered through spellings like Patomake and Patowmack before the federal Board on Geographic Names settled it. Its resemblance to potamos, the ancient Greek word for river, has intrigued people for more than two hundred years, but appears to be pure coincidence.
The river starts from two sources. The North Branch rises at the Fairfax Stone where three West Virginia counties meet; the South Branch begins near Hightown in Highland County, Virginia, winding past mountains and through the 20-mile Smoke Hole Canyon, where bald eagles nest in a gorge called the Trough. The branches join near Green Spring, West Virginia. From there the Potomac crosses five geological provinces, from the Appalachian Plateau to the coastal plain, dropping 930 metres over 405 miles before widening to 11 miles at its mouth on the Chesapeake Bay.
Below Little Falls, at the edge of the coastal plain, the river becomes tidal and grows saltier as it flows past Washington, D.C. Geologists date the Potomac to no less than 3.5 million years ago, and Great Falls took its present shape during recent ice ages. Long before Europeans, the Algonquian Piscataway confederacy governed the region.
The Potomac later became a political line. It divides Maryland and the capital from Virginia and West Virginia, and during the Civil War it marked the border between Union and Confederacy, lending its name to the Union's largest army. George Washington's home at Mount Vernon overlooks its banks. More than 6 million people live in its watershed today, from upstream coal country to the watermen of Virginia's Northern Neck.
Source: Potomac River
