Chap. 446.—An ACT designating that part of the State highway system from
Old Point, through Newport News and Williamsburg, to Richmond, as the
‘Pocahontas Trail.’’ fH B 298]

Approved March 21, 1924.

Whereas, when, in sixteen hundred and seven, the first permanent
English settlement in America was planted at Jamestown, all of what
is now eastern Virginia, as far to the west as the head of tidewater in
the several rivers flowing into the great Chesapeake bay, was ruled by
the Indian King Powhatan, whose two principal places of residence were
Werowocomoco, about fifteen miles from Jamestown, and Powhatan,
near the site of the present city of Richmond, and with him as he went
from one to the other journeyed Pocahontas, his favorite daughter; and,

Whereas, Pocahontas, in saving the life of Captam John Smith,
when in captivity among the Indians, in furnishing food on numerous
occasions to the starving colonists, in giving information more than
once of intended Indian treachery, and finally, in bringing about for
some years by her marriage to John Rolfe a cessation of hostilities be-
tween her own and her husband’s people, was the instrument, under
God, that made possible the accomplishment at that time of the pur-
pose of the English nation to found a permanent settlement in Virginia;
and,

Whereas, the great State highway extending from Old Point through
Newport News and Williamsburg, to Richmond, recently completed,
traverses territory with which Pocahontas was certainly familiar, runs,
no doubt, through cultivated fields today which in her day, too, were
bringing forth harvests of Indian corn, to supply that store which she
so generously shared with the new-comers, and is, it may be, the modern
successor and inheritor of Indian trails not a few over which this maiden
benefactress traveled in her missions of mercy; now, therefore,

1. Be it enacted by the general assembly of Virginia, That as a
token of appreciation of Virginians of the present, some of whom are
proud to trace their ancestry back to this maid of the forest, of the trans-
cendant services rendered by her in the critical days of the founding
of the colony, this great highway be looked upon as a memorial of these
services and be named the Pocahontas Trail.