Qualla: Chowan River

Chowan River: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The name on the map was written down in 1584. Two English captains - Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe - had been sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to survey the coast north of Spanish Florida, and as they recorded the names the local Algonquian people used for their rivers and islands, they wrote down Chowanook. The English shortened it, eventually, to Chowan. Today it is one of just three English-recorded place names in the United States that have survived continuously since that first voyage; the other two are Roanoke Island and the Neuse River. The river itself runs blackwater, stained tea-dark by tannins from the cypress and gum swamps that line its banks, fifty miles from the Virginia state line down into the open water of Albemarle Sound.

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Chowan River: Born from Two Rivers

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 len...

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Chowan River: Burning of Winton

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Chowan River: Blackwater and Largemouth

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 nutrie...

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Chowan River: Chowanoke

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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