How environmental forces, and human responses to them, profoundly shaped both Native American and colonial life along the Potomac River. James D. Rice’s fresh study of the Potomac River basin begins with a mystery. Why, when the whole of the region offered fertile soil and excellent fishing and hunting, was nearly three-quarters of the land uninhabited on the eve of colonization? Rice wonders how the existence of this no man’s land influenced nearby Native American and, later, colonial settlements. Did it function as a commons, as a place where all were free to hunt and fish? Or was it perceived as a strange and hostile wilderness? Rice discovers environmental factors at the center of the story. Making use of extensive archaeological and anthropological research, as well as the vast scholarship on farming practices in the colonial period, he traces the region’s history from its earliest known habitation. With exceptionally vivid prose, Rice makes clear the implications of unbridled economic development for the forests, streams, and wetlands of the Potomac River basin. With what effects, Rice asks, did humankind exploit and then alter the landscape and the quality of the river’s waters? Equal parts environmental, Native American, and colonial history, Nature and History in the Potomac Country is a useful and innovative study of the Potomac River, its valley, and its people.

John Willis married Rachell died in Northumberland County, Virginia in 1655. His children are listed in his will as John Jr., William, Charles, Mary and Susannah.

The Huguenot-Anglican Refuge in Virginia is the history of a Huguenot emigrant community established in eight counties along the Rappahannock River of Virginia in 1687, with the arrival of an Anglican-ordained Huguenot minister from Cozes, France named John Bertrand. This Huguenot community, effectively hidden to researchers for more than 300 years, comes to life through the examination of county court records cross-referenced with French Protestant records in England and France. The 261 households and fifty-three indentured servants documented in this study, including a significant group from Bertrand’s hometown of Cozes, comprise a large Huguenot migration to English America and the only one to fully embrace Anglicanism from its inception. In July 1687 a French exile named Durand de Dauphiné published a tract at The Hague outlining the pattern and geography of this migration. The tract included a short list of inducements Virginia officials were offering to attract Huguenot settlers to Rappahannock County. These included access to French preaching by a Huguenot minister who would also serve an established Anglican parish, and the availability of inexpensive land. John Bertrand was the first of five French exile ministers performing this dual track ministry in the Rappahannock region between 1687 and 1767.