DINWIDDLE'S NANTICOKE'S

NANTICOKE INDIANS

HUNTING GROUNDS AND RELICS

OF

MARYLAND

Some interesting discoveries have been made on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia by a Professor William Dinwiddle connected with Maryland State Bureau of Ethnology making a “study”

of prehistoric archeology .

Two ancient Indian villages have been found on the shore of the Manokin River and many relics were found on Maddox Island.

Dinwiddle encamped first at Vienna, where on the banks of the Chicone creek was found signs of an extensive village, known as Indian Town by the people of the Fork district of Dorchester county.

In 1698 an Act of General Assembly of Maryland, renewed in 1704, a grant of land in Dorchester was made to the Indians, a tract of fifty square miles, from the Delaware boarder to the west side of Nanticoke River, according to Bosmans History of Maryland. Out of this tract, three small tracts were granted to whites by the Indians. The Indians were unable to hunt, take timber nor till the lands which led to unpleasant relations and the children left and nothing remains to mark these happy hunting grounds.

In 1711 another grant of three thousand acres was made them north of Broad Creek for the special use of the Nanticoke Tribe, which at first was of Somerset County Maryland but in 1762 became Sussex county Delaware by resurvey. . The Nanticoke's were a powerful tribe and the last to leave the hunting grounds of the Eastern Shore. In the 1762 survey all provincial records cease.

The first new evidence of the Nanticoke Indians was in 1748 a resident of Bethlehem saw them pass by Shomonkin in ten canoes up the Susquehanna toward the Wyoming Valley near the end of the eighteenth century. Almost a centrury later they began to move from Wyoming Valley to Kentucky on the Ohio River, to Ohio. There there were only a small handful and most traces of them were lost.

There are a few males of an Iowa tribe who claim to be descendants of the Nanticokes..

Source: Wilmington Evening Journal, Monday November 7, 1892. page 5.