At midday on February 20, 1825, the Nanjemoy meteorite fell to earth in the young United States, as of which there were only 24 states united at the time. A number that would remain steady for over a decade more.
Nanjemoy is a H6 chondrite with a total known weight of 7.5kg, and was the fourth meteorite to fall in the fledgling USA. The Weston, Connecticut meteorite was the first in 1807 Carswell, North Carolina the second in 1810, and Nobleboro, Main in 1823, as the third. It would be four more years after the Nanjemoy fall before the fifth meteorite would fall on the US with Forsyth, Georgia in 1829.
Nanjemoy proper is a rural area near the Potomac river in Charles County, Maryland. While I could find no specific translation for the word Nanjemoy, ChatGPT suggests:
The name “Nanjemoy” is derived from a Native American word, most likely from the language of the Piscataway people, an Algonquian-speaking tribe native to southern Maryland.
There is no definitive translation, but historians and linguists suggest that Nanjemoy may mean something like:
- Deep fishing place” or “Place of fish”
(referring to the area’s rich fishing grounds along the Potomac River and Nanjemoy Creek) - “Land between the streams”
(referencing the geography of the area, where multiple creeks converge)
- Deep fishing place” or “Place of fish”
The Nanjemoy region is also known for fossils including shark teeth and other marine organisms. And the Nanjemoy Formation even has its own extensive Wikipedia page found here. It seems that the study of coprolites from the Nanjemoy area has been quite enlightening. And who doesn’t love a good coprolite!
Frank Cressy provides excellent detail about Nanjemoy in his essential book From Weston to Creston: A compendium of witnessed US meteorite falls 1807 to 2016. In his one-page entry for Nanjemoy, subtitled “Fireworks along the Potomac,” Cressy includes the glorious eyewitness accounts that lock in the timeframe through human perspective with similes and metaphors. Descriptors including the sound of a cannon, the buzzing of a “humming bee,” a spinning wheel, a chimney on fire, finally an explosion. And just who among us today would recognize the sound of a cannon, let alone a spinning wheel or a chimney fire?
Even more, Cressy includes a story where the Nanjemoy stone was thought to have been blasted from a nearby quarry. Or worse, shot from a mortar on a ship, and of course thus needing the “manning of boats to take vengeance on the captain and crew of the vessel.” Imagine a meteorite fall starting a war even back then!
Nanjemoy celebrates its bicentennial this year having fallen two hundred years ago. Even though there seems to be an unlimited supply of time, hitting a 200 year milestone of preservation in our collections is still a feat. Alas, however, there does seem to have been some lapse in our preservation methods leaving much of the Nanjemoy meteorite unaccounted for. Sadly, of the roughly 7.5kg of Nanjemoy that fell in a single stone, only 2.4kg is accounted for in collections according to the Catalogue of Meteorites. That’s less than one-third of the original TKW. But that is also a pretty good haul given that there were plenty of upcoming distractions over the next two hundred years that would apply stress to the importance collection and preservation of artifacts of any kind.
So here we are in two centuries later in 2025 and I am looking at my slice of Nanjemoy, a stone whose light weathering, or perhaps just aging, parallels the history of my country. So while the turmoil of today fills the news, I need to look at the big picture and consider that the meteorite falls in 2025 will one day be observed through a lens of time completely absent of any social implications we find important right now.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Until next time…
