This portrait of Captain John Smith appeared on a 1616 map of New England.

Capt. John Smith, the Englishman who discovered Stafford

by Hugh Muir

Date published: 4/1/2008

by Hugh Muir

Four hundred years ago this summer, Capt. John Smith sailed up the Potomac and then the Rappahannock rivers to become the first Englishman to set foot on what was to become Stafford County.

To kick off this celebratory year, the Stafford County Historical Society last week heard "Keeper of the Knowledge" Marion Brooks Robinson recount the life and times of the adventurer who fought in France, Turkey and Hungary (where the Hapsburgs made him a captain for his heroics), as well as against Native Americans in Virginia, and who died in his bed in his native England in 1631 at the age of 51.

He also achieved immortality by, he said, being saved by Pocahontas from execution in 1607 by her father, Chief Powhatan, whose "kingdom" included what became Stafford County in 1664.

This most popular of early Colonial stories has been both vouched for and trashed by historians. John Smith is the only eye-witness who ever wrote about it. Keeper Robinson, 82, told the Society audience that she never believed it.

Smith was a leader of the original colonists who founded Jamestown in May 1607. As Robinson put it, Europeans came to the New World looking for two things: gold and the Northwest Passage shortcut to the riches of Asia.

Smith made two major explorations in search of both. He scoured every river that fed the Chesapeake Bay in search of the mythical shortcut, which finally led him up the Potomac and the Rappahannock to very different discoveries.

The "gold" he found in Stafford turned out to be iron pyrites and worthless. But he was on to something. In 1782, Thomas Jefferson first documented the presence of gold on the north side of the Rapphannock.

A quarter century later Virginia became one of the country's significant gold-producing states, including some 10 gold mines in southwest Stafford. Virginia reached its peak output just before the California gold rush of 1849.

Pushing up the Potomac during his initial major exploration of the Bay area in 1608, Smith first explored Stafford by taking his 30-foot shallop a short distance up Aquia Creek. He then returned to the river and first stepped ashore in the county at what is now Marlborough Point, adjacent to Crows Nest.

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Date published: 4/1/2008