Widewater State Park

Native Americans lived, hunted and fished in the area for centuries. Captain John Smith visited the area in this first and second voyages in 1607–1609 and claimed the area for England, while using that indigenous peoples as guides and trading partners. By 1670 George Brent a lawyer who had fled the English Civil War established a plantation along Aquia Creek, which he and relatives farmed until after the American Revolutionary War, increasingly using enslaved labor. In addition to farming activities by the Brents and their successors, the area became a prominent fishery, even after silting of Aquia Harbor made loading tobacco onto overseas ships difficult. Aquia Landing (now a county park) at the peninsula's foot had become a steamship terminal by 1815. By the 1840s, it had become the terminus of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad. During the American Civil War, Aquia Landing changed hands several times, and an estimated 10,000 formerly enslaved people used it to flee north. In 1872, a reconstructed railroad bridge led to the decline of Aquia Landing and the formerly busy Brooke Road.

However, another reconstructed railroad line on the peninsula could transport fish to city markets. It became the largest fish shipping terminal on the Cheasapeake in the early 20th century until pollution and overfishing compromised the fishery so that it nearly vanished by the Great Depression. Fishing is now regulated by a joint commission.^[3] In 1903 Samuel P. Langley conducted an early flight experiment with a steam powered airplane from a houseboat offshore at Widewater.^[4] From the 1750s until the 1920s, Clifton fishery operated at Widewater, one of five or six commercial fisheries in the area which used massive seine and gill nets and other means to capture herring, shad, rockfish and even sturgeon (for caviar). In 1922, Western Marine and Salvage acquired 200 "ghost ships" (wooden steamships constructed during World War I), moved them to Widewater and attempted to strip them of metal machinery and fittings. Local outrage about the resulting pollution led to the operation's transfer across the Potomac to Mallows Bay, Maryland, where it was ended as unprofitable during World War II, despite a similar recycling attempt by Bethlehem Steel. Another attempt in the 1960s failed to start, when Congress heard testimony that the ghost fleet was providing important wildlife habitat.^[5]