Northern Neck of Virginia The Northern Neck of Virginia is a
peninsula that lies between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers,
and borders on the Chesapeake Bay. By the 1650s, the area's
original inhabitants, the Powhatan tribe, had been pushed
inland, and large tobacco plantations had been developed by
English settlers. George Washington and Robert E. Lee, among
other historical figures, were born here. On the Lower Northern
Neck, near the Chesapeake, fishing villages grew up that were
almost inaccessible by land. On a finger of land between two
branches of Cockrell Creek, a tiny town had been the home of
generations of watermen before a "come-here" ("newcomer" in
local speech) from New England named Elijah Reed brought a new
kind of fishing in the 1870s. Menhaden—which are oily little
fish—were found throughout the entire Mid-Atlantic region in
profusion. Reed brought a method of extracting large quantities
of oil from the fish by rendering them by the millions. Their
oil was used as a lubricant and in light