Walk 18: Cabin John Creek Section 4 and How'd It Get That Name Anyway?

Loki and I bump into deer fairly regularly on our walks, and because deer are creatures of habit, usually in the same places too. The Cabin John Creek trails between River Road and Bradley Blvd from Bradly Blvd to Democracy are two trails where we can count on seeing white tails.,

There's a doe in there somewhere.

This shot of a doe was taken on the 1.7 mile walk between between Bradley and Democracy. This is one of my favorite walks because not only do you have the creek on one side but the trail branches off and goes up and down several hills. In any case, there's plenty of time to wonder about things such as how did the creek and community next to it wind up with the somewhat weird name of Cabin John. Why not John's Cabin.

The truth is, no one really knows now how the name got stuck on the area. One theory is that there was a hermit named John who lived in a cabin. This strikes me as the least imaginative and least plausible.

The creek with the funny name.

The next idea  that gets kicked around is that Cabin John is a misspelling of Captain John and there are two candidates for this role. The first is Captain John Smith, the founder of Jamestown, who sailed up the Potomac in 1608 as far as Great Falls where the rapids blocked his way.

This is how Captain John described the area "Having gone so high as we could with the bote, we met divers savages in canowes well loaden with flesh of beares, deere, and other beasts whereof we had part."


Clearly, spelling was much more fun back in 1608. In any case, as you can see from the top photo, the deer are still here even if Captain John has passed on.


The second candidate for Captain John is a pirate captain who fled from his crew and buried some treasure in the area. Not to be a wet blanket, but I've sort of noticed that there isn't a square mile of the East Coast that doesn't have a pirate story connected to it. Either there were several million pirates roaming around back in the day or someone is making stuff up. Coming a bit closer to our time, the area of Cabin John was mostly tobacco farms until 1912 when a development company snapped up one of the farms and subdivided it. They included a clause in their contracts that any pirate treasure found on your lot had to be split 50-50 with the land company. Whee! Now that's a sales gimmick! For the record, nobody found pieces of eight under their houses or if they did, they forgot to tell the land company.

What we do know is that in the mid-1700s when Lord Baltimore owned the Maryland colony, he was passing out land grants to his friends, and in the records, Cabin John Creek is called Captain John Run or Captain John Branch.

Captain John, whoever he was, would recognize this landscape. With our forests grown back, it looks a lot more like 1608 than 1908 when the area was clear cut. 

Practical information: Out Bradley towards River Road. Park in either small parking lots on side of Bradley. The trail is about 1.3 miles so plan on 2.6 miles round trip and it is somewhat hilly. Deer tend to wander around in the floodplain where the creek makes an oxbow.