How Did The Anacostia River Get Its Name?

 During a zoom presentation to the St Peter School in November, a student asked me about how the Anacostia got its name and made me realize I was unclear about that.

Much of what we see now is a neglect of our Native history, so how did the river get its name?

It turns out that when Thomas Jefferson was serving as the first Secretary of State in the early 1790s, he was interested in learning the Native name for the river, and Andrew Ellicott, who was mapping the land that would become the District of Columbia sent him word that that the name was "Anna Kostia." 

Jefferson directed Ellicott to include the name on future maps, and Ellicott's 1793 map was the 1st to include a version of the name, Anacostia.

References:

1. Hutchinson, Louise D. The Anacostia Story, 1608-1930. Washington: Published for the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum of the Smithsonian Institution by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977. Print.

page xix (#27): (see para 2)

Pdf online: https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/anacostiastor1600hutc

2. loc.gov call number for Ellicott 1793 map - G3850 1793 .E42 1898)

Thomas Jefferson asked the name of the DC Natives & No one knew

The opening chapter of "Chocolate City (2017)" reviews what happened to the Natives of DC very well! (Although I've heard the Fleete story differently.)
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Around 1800, Thomas Jefferson asked about "the name of the Native Americans who lived along the Eastern Branch, no one could answer him."

About 100 years later, in 1918, Margaret Brent Downing wrote:
The Earliest Proprietors of Capitol Hill 

Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C.

Vol. 21 (1918), pp. 1-23 (23 pages) (availble through JSTOR)

She complains on page 3. “Few cities of the larger and more cultured class have displayed a greater indifference towards the original owners of the land on which it has been built than the National Capital.”

Ms Downing was consistent with this complaint and never mentioned the Natives again in her article.


In 2018, you can visit the American Indian Museum and see this tradition upheld.