[3] The indigenous Appomattoc people inhabited this region and encountered European colonists by the early 18th century, when the first enslaved Africans were brought to work here.

"[7] When formally organized as a town in 1752, it was renamed Pocahontas after the Native American daughter of Powhatan, who was important in early Virginian colonial history and, together with her husband, John Rolfe, became an ancestor of numerous First Families of Virginia.

[5] Numerous antebellum houses survive, especially on the island's east end, and archeologists have also unearthed the foundations of the railroad depot and the Petersburg Distilling Company, Inc.

[3] The island's remaining 19th-century houses were built in the "shotgun style" usually associated with larger southern cities such as New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta and Louisville to make maximum use of narrow urban lots as well as local ventilation patterns.

It took decades for Petersburg to rebuild after the American Civil War, although one railroad line was rebuilt sufficiently by November 1867 for General Robert E. Lee to stop at the city en route to his son's wedding.

Pocahontas had mixed industrial, commercial and residential use, including a sawmill by 1877 and a powder magazine on land now occupied by a waste treatment plant.

[15] After the war, Pocahontas-born free black William N. Stevens became a lawyer and the first African American to serve in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly, although his legislative district centered on nearby Sussex County.

[16] Increasing industrialization in Petersburg and nearby Hopewell provided continued opportunities for blacks, even though the white-dominated Virginia legislature imposed racial segregation and disfranchisement in the late 19th century.

Ice, coal, oil and lumber companies operated on Pocahontas by the early 20th century, although the island suffered devastating floods in 1910 and 1920, and the river rechannelled midway between.

Furthermore, the DuPont company established a munitions factory in nearby Hopewell by 1914, and although that city burned the following year, it then prospered, and many blacks chose to live on Pocahontas.

The Great Migration to northern industrial cities, starting about World War I, is the time Islanders refer to as "when they lost the 'cream of the crop', and the majority of the remaining population being elderly retirees who sustain themselves on small fixed incomes.