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Native
Americans lived intermittently along the edge of the river they
called the Cohongoroota for thousands of years. Riverbottom lands
provided fertile soil for their fields of squash and corn, and the
rolling limestone uplands supported plentiful resources including
large herds of buffalo and elk grazing in the meadows amidst scattered
patches of oak-hickory forest. Village locations changed frequently
based on the availability of resources and competition with other
groups. The latest evidence for a seasonal encampment at the site
that became NCTC is dated at about 400 years before Europeans first
explored the lower Shenandoah Valley. Among the enduring legacies
of the people who once lived here are the beautiful names given
to local creeks and rivers: Shenandoah, Antietam, Opequon, Tuscarora,
Conococheague, Cacapon.
Archeological
evidence on the NCTC property has shown that Native Americans utilized
the site intermittently upwards of 8000 years. Dating of cultural
artifacts suggests that regular occupancy of the site ended about
1300 A.D.; this matches a regional pattern characterized by pronounced
changes in the distribution and subsistence strategies of earlier
cultural groups often correlated with a climate phenomenon known
as the Little Ice Age. The very few European accounts of the area
between the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers in the 1720s indicate
the area was utilized by small groups of natives for occasional
seasonal subsistence, including fish traps to catch springtime sucker
runs near present-day Harper’s Ferry. The I-81 corridor about
10 miles west of NCTC today roughly follows a major trail from New
York to the Carolinas once used by various groups including the
Delaware, Shawnee and Catawba tribes; another ancient trail crossed
the river at Pack Horse ford about a mile south of Shepherdstown.
There seems not to have been any large or long-term settlements
of Native Americans in the Shepherdstown area when Europeans began
moving into the valley; the Maryland Council in the early 1700s
spoke of Indian towns at Conestoga, Pennsylvania, the Shawnee town
at present-day Oldtown, Maryland, a fort near Great Falls on the
Potomac and several other tribes with towns around the Chesapeake
Bay. A group of Tuscarora Indians, after fleeing the Carolinas sometime
after 1715, lived at the site of present-day Martinsburg for a time
(some accounts suggest they moved there after 1730), then left just
prior to the French and Indian War in the 1750s. Note that these
tribal names were often designations given to them by the Europeans
– kinship patterns were complex and the natives themselves
may have felt little connection to their assigned group.
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