Island Creek Elementary School

Here follows a history of the school as published on the Fairfax County Public Schools website:

What's in a Name?
Learn about the origin of our school's name in this video produced for Fairfax County Public Schools’ cable television channel Red Apple 21:

Island Creek Elementary School opened in September 2003. During the early 1990s, when the surrounding Island Creek neighborhood was being named, researchers incorrectly identified this part of Fairfax County as having been known historically as Island Creek. The first land patent in what would become Fairfax County was issued in 1651 to Richard Turney for 2,109 acres of land abutting the Potomac River commonly called or known by the name of Doeg’s Island. Doeg’s Island was, in fact, not an island at all. It was the name of the Mason Neck peninsula prior to its ownership by the Mason family. Doeg’s Island Creek, or simply Island Creek as the name appears in later land patents, was what is today known as Gunston Cove. The name also applied to Pohick Creek, one of the cove's two main tributaries. In June 1608, during his exploration of the Potomac River, Captain John Smith received a friendly welcome from the Tauxenant Indian tribe on Mason Neck. The tribe’s name was later shortened to Taux or Toags by the English, and then further corrupted to Dogue. Their capital town, called Tauxenant, was located on Mason Neck northeast of where Belmont Bay narrows into the Occoquan River, hence the name Doeg’s Island. A second town, called Namassingakent, was located north of the mouth of what is now Dogue Creek on land that later became part of George Washington's Mount Vernon estate. Archaeologists with the Fairfax County Park Authority have conducted several excavations on Mason Neck during which they discovered a variety of Native American artifacts. As archaeologists we know that people have been living in Fairfax County for the better part of at least 15,000 years. Here in this area we know for certain that's probably been at least 10,000 years from the evidence we've recovered. This area would have been very good for their use because of all the resources that are available: animals, and trees, and plants that live in the forest that they could have used as food sources. These are Native American stone tools and the different types of stone tell us from where the stone came, which can tell us a lot how Native Americans traded back and forth. The different shapes of the bases are ways that archaeologists see the changes in stone tools over time and help us tell how old an archaeological site is. This point in particular is very interesting. It came from this park and it's 10,000 years old. So imagine the people who would have lived here in the past. People would have needed a lot of objects for their daily life, and we find those as archaeologists. We find tools like this quartz stone tool. What is really interesting about this is that it's been very purposefully shaped. If you look at the ridges this angle is very straight and might be used as something like a cutting motion, whereas over here it's more jagged and might be more of a kind of saw action. Some of the areas could have even been used to scrape, the type of thing you would have used to shape an arrowhead or a dart shaft.

Like Mason Neck, the area around Island Creek Elementary School is rich with history, some of which relates to the earliest years of the Fairfax County public school system. During the naming process for Island Creek Elementary School, one of the names also considered by the community was Laurel Grove in reference to the Laurel Grove School, a one-room schoolhouse located two miles away that served as a public school for African-American children from the 1880s to the 1930s. Also very close to Island Creek Elementary, one half of a mile away, is the site of another school from this era which was named the Potter’s Hill School. You can learn more about the history of these early Fairfax County public schools in our companion series Schools of Yesteryear.