The Chiskiack Indians

The Chiskiack Indians, who were living on the lower side of the York River when Virginia’s first European colonists arrived, were under the sway of the Native emperor Powhatan. During the mid-to-late 1630s, they withdrew to the Middle Peninsula, when settlers began moving into their homeland on the York River. In 1649 Ossakican, leader of the Chiskiack or “North Indians,” was allocated 5,000 acres as a preserve or reservation. That land, which had been surveyed by 1662, extended along the lower side of the Piankatank River as far as Harper Creek and ran inland for a mile. The Chiskiacks’ old and new towns were mentioned in several early land patents for acreage in what is now in Mathews County.  During the 1640s, Wadinger Creek was known as Tankes or Tanx (Little) Chiskiack Creek. 

By 1655 the Chiskiack’s leaders had disposed of more than half of their assigned land. This prompted the Council of State to assign the rest of it to church officials for the “glebes of  Gloucester,” contingent upon the natives abandoning it. In October 1669 when Virginia officials compiled a census of the colony’s native population, they noted that there were only 15 Chiskiack Indian warriors, who were  living in Gloucester County. References to the Chiskiack cease after 1677,  suggesting that they may have disbursed or been assimilated into other native groups.

​By Martha McCartney, Passage from Mathews County: Lost Landscapes, Untold Stories