The Chowan begins where the Blackwater and Nottoway rivers, both of them dropping out of southeastern Virginia, meet just above the North Carolina line. From that confluence south, it is the Chowan - and a curious river even by the standards of the coastal plain. Wide for its length, the Chowan grows to almost two miles across as it nears the Albemarle Sound. Tidal but barely - normal tidal variation is less than a foot - it drains about 4,800 square miles of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina before delivering that water to the Sound at Edenhouse Point, where the U.S. 17 bridge crosses. The point is named for Charles Eden, an early-eighteenth-century North Carolina governor whose plantation sat nearby.

The Chowan saw heavy Civil War action. The Union plan was straightforward: send gunboats up the river, bombard the small Confederate posts along the bank, and reach the rail line at Weldon that supplied Robert E. Lee's army in Virginia. The boats sailed past the small Confederate emplacements at Deep Creek near Harrellsville and at Petty's Shore near Cofield, where the remains of an old bunker can still be picked out in the landscape. At Winton, the Confederate troops set an ambush. According to accounts of the engagement, the soldiers used a young enslaved Black woman - recorded in period sources with the dehumanizing language of the time - to deliver a false message to the Union sailors that the locals had fled in fear. The ruse nearly worked. A Union soldier spotted sunlight glinting off a musket barrel in the trees. The ships pulled back, regrouped, returned later, and burned Winton to the ground. The same fleet later landed at Murfreesboro via the Meherrin River and marched west toward Weldon.

What the Chowan offers anglers is one of the better largemouth bass and catfish fisheries on the East Coast. The average channel depth is sixteen feet, with a maximum of about forty feet near Holiday Island. The blackwater chemistry produces a particular ecosystem - low in nutrients, low in dissolved oxygen, but rich in the bottom-feeding species that thrive in tannin-stained water. Bonds Creek, the Meherrin River, Bennett's Creek (which connects the Chowan to Merchant's Millpond State Park), and the Wiccacon River are the major tributaries. Each carries its own small watershed and its own slow current down into the main channel. Paddlers report passing under cypress canopies hung with Spanish moss, the water so dark it reflects the sky as black.

The Chowanoc - or Chowanoke - people for whom the river was named were the largest Algonquian polity on the coastal plain of what is now North Carolina at the time of English contact. Their main town stood near the river's confluence with the Sound, and their fields and palisades were what the English first encountered. War, disease, and dispossession in the late seventeenth century reduced the Chowanoke from a major regional power to a small remnant. By the early eighteenth century only a few families remained on a small reservation. By the late nineteenth century there were no recognized Chowanoke communities. The river still carries the name they gave it - shortened, anglicized, but recognizable - and a single English vowel still preserves the language of the first people on this coast. Descendants of the Chowanoke continue to live in the surrounding counties.