The county is named for the paramount chief of the powerful confederacy of tribes of Algonquian-speaking Native Americans in the Tidewater in 1607, when the British settled at Jamestown.

French refugees also settled on the other side of the river in two villages now known collectively as Manakin-Sabot in nearby Goochland County to the north.

Among the historic tribes in the Piedmont were the Monacan,[3] who were Siouan-speaking and were recorded as having several villages west of what the colonists later called Manakin Town on the James River.

They also were subject to raids by Iroquois from the north, who were based south of the Great Lakes in present-day New York and Pennsylvania.

By the end of the 17th century, the Monacan had been decimated by warfare and infectious diseases carried by the mostly English colonists and traders; their survivors were absorbed into other Siouan tribes.

In 1700 and 1701, about 700-800 French Huguenot religious refugees[4] on five ships arrived at Jamestown from London, having been promised land grants and settlement in Lower Norfolk County by the Crown.

Many of them had been merchants and artisans in London, which was overflowing with refugees from French Catholic persecution after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

As the tobacco plantations along the James River were dependent upon shipping and water transport, the area in the Piedmont above the head of navigation at the fall line had not yet been settled.

Claiming the Norfolk area was unhealthful (although it became an area of entrepreneurs), Francis Nicholson, governor of the colony, and William Byrd II, a wealthy and influential planter, offered the French refugees 10,000 acres to settle at what became known as Manakin Town, on land abandoned by the Monacan Indians about 20 miles (32 km) above the falls of the James River.

[6] The falls on the river prevented them from traveling downriver and the lack of roads mean that they were very isolated, and essentially cut off from the Jamestown settlement.

Although they had planned to build a town based on the French village model, it proved impractical, as the most fertile land lay along the James River.

The grant was divided more or less equally, with each grantee in 1710 receiving about 133 acres, stretching in narrow lots from the river, so that each household would have access to the water.

Many of the Huguenot descendants migrated west into the Piedmont and across the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee, as did neighboring English colonists, as well as south along the coast, with some ultimately settling in Texas.

[8] In addition, the nearby Manakin Episcopal Church,[9] built in 1954, continues full services for a regional congregation.

When a new courthouse was built in 1778, the immediate area was named "Scottville" after General Charles Scott, a Revolutionary War soldier.

The larger planters used numerous Black American slaves to cultivate and process tobacco, and later mixed crops, including wheat.

Even after Reconstruction, Powhatan County used Convict lease workers (chiefly African American) to build roads in 1878.