Many of the indentured servants came to the Northern Neck from Warwickshire and their manner of speech was added to the region, for instance: off sporting, or frolicking, meant, having a good time; traipsing about, meant, off walking about; make the fire, meant, kindle the fire, and peart, meant, lively.
The constant reading of the Bible also helped to keep the speech pure and simple.
After the war the shopping trips to Baltimore were resumed, but with a difference. There were few men in the Neck now and the women had changed. Hardened by sorrow and privations they were now able to face realities. There were many widows.
They gathered their children together, and all the produce they could assemble, and traveled to town on the sailing vessel of some older relative or neighbor who might be taking a cargo of oysters or cordwood to market.
When they arrived in Baltimore, usually in the very early morning, the sleepy children must be aroused and dressed. Pantalettes,[10] so painstakingly laundered before leaving home, were now dirty and wrinkled. With the bedraggled children, coops of quacking ducks and hissing geese, crates of eggs and firkins of lard and butter, the brave women finally landed on the dock and made their way up Light Street to the commission merchants, who would buy their produce. After disposing of their business they went to the stores to shop for necessities to carry home to the Northern Neck.
[Footnote 10: Pantalettes were generally worn about 1830-50. The fact that they were still being worn by children of the Northern Neck is probably due to the isolated location of this peninsula.]
In their voyage of discovery in the Chesapeake Captain John Smith and his companions found schools of fish agitating the surface of the water. The written accounts of these men state that the fish were so thick that they attempted to dip them up in a frying-pan but it proved to be "not a good instrument to catch fish with."
These fish are believed to have been menhaden, known to naturalists as brevoortia. This ordinary looking fish was destined to change the course of history in the lower Northern Neck.
The Indian names for this species, munnawhatteaug (corrupted to menhaden), and pauhagen (pogy), literally means fertilizer--"fish that enriches the earth." The Indians were accustomed to employ this species, with others of the herring tribe, in enriching their cornfields. They showed the white men how to make their corn grow by putting two dead fish in each hill of corn.