PART I

THE HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS OF GEORGETOWN

Three rocks, spired and gloomy,
Gray as a stormy sky,
Sprang from the depth of the whirlpool,
Where the Indian sisters lie,

Ever at night they ring,
Like a sad cathedral bell,
Echoing far on the waters,
They sound the warning knell.

–unnamed ballad of the Three Sisters

Like many East Coast cities, the reason Georgetown exists in the first place is a geographical feature known as the fall line. Some 300,000 years ago, the area we know as Georgetown was the coastline of a much higher Atlantic Ocean. Today, it is where the coastal plane meets the rockier piedmont. This fascinating geological trivia aside, it means that Georgetown was the highest navigable point for oceangoing vessels, and it is why the town developed to allow tobacco farmers to ship their product for export.

In the Potomac, the increasingly shallow waters are marked by three islands known as the Three Sisters. This was as far as British explorer John Smith could sail during his 1608 expedition before leaving his boat to travel farther upriver. He noted in his diary, "Having gone so high as we could with the bote, we met divers Salvages in Canowes, well loaden with the flesh of Beares, Deere and other beasts, whereof we had part, here we found mighty Rocks."

Like Smith, other voyagers also found the Three Sisters to be the limit of safe navigation, and a small trading post sprang up. By 1751, it had grown enough that the Province of Maryland authorized the creation of George Town, presumably named after King George II of England.

THREE SISTERS ISLANDS

While civic progress continued to be made, the portion of the river near the Three Sisters acquired an ominous reputation. The waters themselves are treacherous, sucking in swimmers and boaters even in present days. But cagey locals began to suspect something more, something beyond what mere fluid dynamics could explain.

On a hot Thursday morning in late May 1889, eighteen-year-old Samuel Graff left his downtown home to beat the heat on a fishing jaunt on the Potomac with three friends. They rented a boat from Johnson and Baker's boathouse, just above the Aqueduct Bridge (a few hundred feet upstream of the current Key Bridge), and paddled out to the Three Sisters. The boys spent the morning fishing (history fails to record if they caught anything), but by midafternoon, the skies had darkened and they decided to continue their attempts from the shore.

They had but one boat; a skiff that could seat only two of them. Samuel volunteered to ferry the others, and the first two trips went without incident. Unfortunately, the wind picked up, and he "was on his last trip with the third one when, by an unexpected, quick, treacherous movement of the boat it was so far careened as to throw Graff into the water, while his companion succeeded in retaining his seat."

Samuel had the only paddle, and his friend could do nothing but watch helplessly as he slipped below the waters. His body was recovered below Alexandria, Virginia, three weeks later. All in all, a sad but hardly remarkable occurrence on the river.

Seven years later, the tale (somewhat altered) was expounded on by American writer and folklorist Charles M. Skinner in the fifth volume of his nine-volume work Myths and Legends of Our Own Land. In his tale "The Moaning Sisters," Skinner related that the night "before a human life is to be yielded ... this low wailing comes from the rocks, and when, on a night in May, 1889, the sound floated shoreward, just as the clock in Georgetown struck twelve, good people who were awake sighed and uttered a prayer for the one whose doom was so near at hand."

So who was this moaning that presaged death on the Potomac? Skinner attributed it to a tradition more than one hundred years old:

[A] boat in which three sisters had gone for a row was swung against one of these rocks. The day was gusty and the boat was upset. All three of the girls were drowned. Either the sisters remain about this perilous spot or the rocks have prescience; at least, those who live near them on the shore hold one view or the other, for they declare that before every death on the river the sisters moan, the sound being heard above the lapping of the waves. It is different from any other sound in nature.

Skinner left unsaid who the three sisters were, except that they had gone for a "row," implying at least that they were not native to the land (canoes are paddled). But the consensus among others was that the stories were even older — that they were early native Americans who once lived here. A Washington Post article in 1907 tells the tale:

Three maidens, it is said, of the Anacostan tribe, were loved by three Powhattan braves, and it was arranged that the girls would, on a certain night, embark in canoes, cross the river, and become the wives of the enemy of their tribe. Legend says they were three sisters and daughters of the chief. The medicine man of their tribe found out the secret of their conspiracy, and followed them along the shore. The girls were decked in their best garments, ornamented with many shells and feathers, which hampered their paddling. A fierce wind was blowing down the Potomac, and a store was threatening as they started. They paddled some distance up the Maryland shore to a point agreed upon for the crossing, and as the canoes glided along the hair of the maidens floated far behind in the wind.

Just as they turned the canoes toward the Virginia shore the medicine man called a warning to them and declared that if they did not return the hour of their death had come. The maidens, in fright, pulled strongly at the paddles and reached midstream. But curious lights played about the canoes, and spiritual voices seemed to shout their doom. Thoroughly frightened at the unusual display of lightning and thunders, which they attributed to the supernatural power of the medicine man, the three sisters plunged into the waters of the river and were drowned. The following day, according to the legend, the...