The Hallowes site, located along the banks of Currioman Bay to the northwest of here is one of the earliest European settlements in Westmoreland County. Due to the proximity of this site to local Indigenous communities who have occupied the land for thousands of years and its location along major travel routes, such as the Potomac River and overland trails, the site acted as a major place of interaction for the Indigenous people of the Northern Neck and the new European immigrants from the 1640s to the 1660s. Much of this interaction would have been driven by trade and archaeological excavations at the site in the 1960s revealed abundant evidence of the presence of the Indigenous people of the Northern Neck and their economy during the seventeenth century. Artifacts recovered from the site that suggest trade with Indigenous people in the area include pottery, bone tools, and tobacco pipes made by an Indigenous pipemaker near Nomini Bay.
In addition to these goods, one of the more significant trade items at the Hallowes site was venison. Analyses of the animal bones at the site indicated that the local Indigenous people were exchanging deer remains with the European inhabitants. Meaty deer parts were coming to the site to be eaten by the European inhabitants there and deer hides were being traded back to England to make a variety of popular products. While trade was a common and easily visible form of interaction between the Northern Neck’s Indigenous inhabitants and European immigrants, it served to facilitate much more culturally complex relationships that ranged from relatively peaceful and cooperative to violent and exploitative. Ironically, trading interactions between the Indigenous people of the region and Europeans would lead to the expansion of European settlement up the Northern Neck and the displacement and death of thousands of the area’s Indigenous inhabitants in just a few short decades. Despite these negative impacts on the area’s Indigenous inhabitants two contemporary communities of the descendants of these Indigenous peoples have persisted on the Northern Neck, the Rappahannock Tribe and the Patawomeck Tribe.
