Talk:Powhite Creek

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[edit] Pronunciation

I saw there was no citation for the POW-hite pronunciation, and I didn't think it was right, so I thought I'd look into it.

My father and his parents, lifelong residents of the area, used the pronunciation "PO-white." It was pronounced that way by everyone I knew, in the 1950s and 60s. My mother told me the name referred to the people who used to live up in the woods northwest of where Buford Road crosses the creek. It was a casual pronunciation of "poor white" as in "poor white trash" but without the mean-spirited derogatory connotation of that term. I never heard it called POW-hite until I returned for a visit after many years' absence, and the traffic reporter on the radio referred to the POW-hite Parkway. I thought it was a misinformed pronunciation, or maybe changed to be more PC with the influx of new residents, developments and shopping centers that had so radically changed the area. Looking at the article that said the name had been around for over 300 years, I wondered if the old folks were just kidding, or misinformed themselves. Looking for a reference that validated the 300-year assertion in the article was an interesting exercise.

This is apparently a subject that has come up before with Richmond residents. One Richmond blogger (Richmond Daily Photo) says there was a 2001 ad campaign for political correctness, declaring the pronunciation to be Pow-hite, but that Richmonders haven't changed and only traffic reporters say it that way now. Although there are many sources that say it was an Indian tribe or an Indian word, most just assert that as fact, as part of an explanation of why you shouldn't say PO-white.

I found a reference in a 1934 R.E. Lee Biography describing an 1862 battle in which both Powhite and Powhite Creek are mentioned. Powhite is given as the site (or name) of a Dr. Gaines' plantation house near Powhite Creek. It seems unlikely that the plantation owner would have named his place for poor white people. The map shows the house and creek to be north of Richmond, though, with the creek going into the Chickahominy River instead of the James – a different place entirely! I was unable to determine what that branch of the Chickahominy is called now or even if it's still there, but it's apparently not still named Powhite Creek. A footnote gives the pronunciation pow-height and says it "took its name from a tribe of Indians that had lived in the vicinity."

I did not find anything in literature about Indians that told about a tribe or band with that name. Still, this comes pretty close to making a case: "The term 'Powhite Indian cabins' appears on a 1701 plat of land on Shockoe Creek." (Tyler-McGraw, Marie (1994). At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia and Its People. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 30. ISBN 0807844764. ) The Shockoe area of present-day Richmond is also pretty far from Bon Air, so again it's a different Powhite, but finding the word in this context points pretty solidly to an Indian connection. I wonder if the word might have been a dialect pronunciation, misspelling or abbreviation of Powhatan, the tribe who did live in the area at least into the 1700s. If it was a word the Indians used, instead of a name they were called, we can only guess at the pronunciation since the language has long been extinct and that happened before we could get a recording. At least one Virginia historian, Philip Barbour, is reported to have said the name of the tribe should be pronounced PO hat an, with a long O and emphasis on 1st syllable, ignoring the W. If that's so, then even the comparison to Powhatan could bring us back to PO-white.    brucemcdon – 00:35, 17 February 2008 (UTC)