Weyanoke Elementary School

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

Weyanoke Elementary School opened in September, 1949. Our school only had four classrooms when it opened, and six additions have been built since that time. Weyanoke was named for a nearby neighborhood that was built in the 1920s. The developers of the neighborhood named the streets after Native American Indian tribes.

Who were the Weyanoke people of Virginia?

Weyanoke Elementary opened in 1949. It's named for a nearby neighborhood. The Weyanoke neighborhood was built in the 1920s. The neighborhood and its streets were named for Native American Indian tribes. They lived in Virginia a long time ago and this is their story:

The Weyanoke people were folks who lived on the James River. They had their own chief but they were subject to a greater chief that most people have heard of in this world because he had a famous daughter.
The man was Powhatan and the daughter was Pocahontas. So the Weyanoke were officially the subjects of Pocahontas. Powhatan ruled all of eastern Virginia from Richmond, Fredericksburg, Washington, eastward down those rivers. 400 years ago eastern Virginia looked somewhat different than it does now and looked quite different from anything that Europeans or urban Americans today were accustomed to. For one thing, it is a world of water and land interspersed, interlaced if you like. The Indians lived in their canoes. Not nearly as much land had been cleared for farming. The Indians were farmers, but there weren't as many Indians, so the place looked like a wilderness to the English who arrived and if we had a time machine it would look pretty much like a wilderness to us. Here the rivers flow down from the white sands and through the plains and into the bay. Never have heaven and earth come together to form a more perfect place for habitation. Here a man with his freedom and good wit and hard work may make a fortune quickly. The Europeans and we still today tend to see water as a barrier, it's a boundary. Counties and cities often have rivers and creeks as their edges, as their boundaries. In the Indian world, it was a reverse. Creeks and rivers were the center of territories. These were people who did most of their traveling by canoe and canoes being like our minivans carry everything heavy in your canoe you take it down the roadway which is actually a waterway. When a river was really, really broad like the Potomac at its mouth then you would have separate tribes living on each side though they were often friends but when you got to a narrower part of the river, such as the Potomac up around Fairfax County and also the James River where the Weyanoke lived, there the river was narrow enough and the paddling across was short enough that they simply considered both sides to be their territory and we see records about Weyanoke on Captain John Smith's map and that's because it was the same people. It was basically the same town.