Three small rocky islands sit in the Potomac about half a mile upriver of Key Bridge, barely big enough to notice from shore. If you’re on the river at night and you hear a low, moaning tone drifting from their direction, an old story says someone nearby is about to drown.
That’s the legend. The islands have another story too, one involving Congress, firebombed construction trailers, and the Three Sisters Bridge, a freeway that nearly buried the islands under concrete. This post is mostly about the legend, where the name came from, and who owned the rocks, with a quick look at the bridge fight near the end.
The Oldest Version: Three Drowned Sisters
The oldest printed version I could find is from 1896. Charles M. Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land has a short entry called “The Moaning Sisters,” and there’s nothing Native American about it. Three local girls go out for a row on a gusty day, their boat slams into one of the rocks, and all three drown.
Here’s how Skinner tells the rest:
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.
Skinner says the drowning happened “more than a hundred years ago,” which would put it, and probably the name, in the 1790s or earlier. He also has a story from May 1889, when people on the shore heard the moaning right at midnight. Twelve hours later, a young rower in a racing shell got caught in an eddy near the rocks, flipped, and drowned.
Skinner adds that “more accidents happen here than at any other point on the river.” That part isn’t folklore. The current around these rocks is still no joke.
The Indian Legend Version, 1900
Four years later, the Washington Post told it very differently. On December 2nd, 1900, the Post ran a big Sunday piece called “Legends of Potomac,” a roundup of what it called “Indian legends still remembered by the old settlers along the river.” Here’s what it had on the Three Sisters. (The Gray Swan it mentions is another tale from the same piece.)
By far the most picturesque river legend is the story of the Three Sisters. Just before a drowning occurs on the river they are believed to emit a sound like the slow chiming of a bell, which is supposed to be a warning call. Its origin is quite as prehistoric as that of the Gray Swan, and rather similar. There were three women of the Anacostian tribe who conspired to desert their people for the Powhatans.
The three dusky maidens, all of them daughters of a chief, as in stories they always are, met together one dark night and stole out in their canoes. The medicine man of their tribe followed them along shore, creeping under brush and woods. They paddled slowly up current. They were decked out in shells and feathers, and their hair streamed long in the wind. They kept the center of the stream, and just as they were about to veer and cross the medicine man called in a hollow voice that their hour of death had come. Curious lights played about them; they were caught in the whirlpool which swirled round their canoes in a dizzy whirl. In fright and despair they flung themselves into the water, and were drowned. In the morning three rocks, gray and barren, had arisen from the water, and were supposed to be the spirits of the Indian sisters barred out from the Happy Hunting Grounds.
There is an old ballad, which gives their story. Part of it runs:
Swiftly they came and swifter,
With dark eyes glancing round,
With soft words glad and eager
For the braves of the Powhatan.When out of the darkness around them,
Out from the black of the trees,
The voice of the Great Spirit called them,
Like the cry of choking seas.They leaped with a moan of terror
Into the heart of the mere.
The waters hissed around them,
The stars were white with fear.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.
The ballad is a nice touch.
In four years the moan became a bell, the drowned girls became a chief’s daughters, and in this version the rocks rise up out of the river overnight. It’s a whole new origin story. The Post calls it an Indian legend, but its source is “old settlers” along the river, not any tribe.
Modern retellings go even further. In one, three sisters drown trying to rescue their brothers, who were held captive across the river. In another, a chief maroons his daughters on the rocks and they curse the crossing. That curse is where today’s “cursed islands” idea comes from, and I couldn’t find it in print anywhere near 1900.
Who Owned the Three Sisters?
Seven years later, the Three Sisters turned up in the Post again, this time for a much more practical reason. The islands were private property, and somebody was about to auction them off. This is from the Washington Post on October 1st, 1907:
The Three Sisters will soon be sold under the auctioneer’s hammer. These islands, which lay about a quarter of a mile above the Aqueduct Bridge, it now develops, form a part of the estate of the late John Moore, to whom they were granted by a land patent in the reign of King George.
…
According to a legend, the Three Sisters received their appellation because three sisters, riding in a frail craft, drowned off the rocks of the little islands twenty-five years ago. The District obtained jurisdiction over the islands, as well as Analoston Island, by a decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Potomac Flats case, by which the District line extends to high water on the Virginia side.
The Aqueduct Bridge stood right next to where Key Bridge is today; Key Bridge replaced it in the 1920s. The Post’s “quarter of a mile” is a little short, since it’s closer to half a mile.
A land patent was an original grant of land from the government, so if the Post had it right, the Moore family held these rocks from before the Revolution.
Analoston Island, by the way, is today’s Theodore Roosevelt Island. The Potomac Flats case settled that the river belongs to the District all the way to the Virginia shoreline. That put the rocks inside DC, but it didn’t change who owned them. The Moore heirs still did.
The legend shifted again, too. In 1896 the drowning was more than a century old. In 1900 it was “prehistoric.” By 1907 it had happened just “twenty-five years ago.”
A notice in the Evening Star set the auction for October 23rd, 1907. If the sale went ahead, it didn’t stick. The islands were still in the hands of John Moore’s heirs more than forty years later.
On December 13th, 1951, the Star reported that the federal government was buying the Three Sisters “for $1,200 from a number of heirs of the original owner.” For years the islands had been “used for sun bathing, fishing and picnicing by trespassers.” Now those visitors were finally legal.
The Bridge That Almost Buried Them
The islands almost didn’t survive the twentieth century, because the Three Sisters Bridge would have been built right on top of them. Pierre L’Enfant proposed a bridge at this spot in 1791, and the idea kept coming back. The push in the 1960s and ’70s came closest, and it turned into one of DC’s nastiest civic fights.
In 1969, Congress held back DC’s Metro funding until the bridge went forward. In October 1969, protesters occupied the islands, and on November 2nd someone firebombed the construction trailers.
Two days later, while voters were at the polls for a school board election, opponents set up their own unofficial ballot boxes outside. About 84 percent of the people who voted in them said no to the bridge and its freeways.
A federal court halted construction in 1970, and the bridge was finally dropped in 1977. I wrote up the whole fight over the Three Sisters Bridge separately, and it’s a wild one.
The Islands Today
Today the Three Sisters are National Park Service land, about half a mile upriver of Key Bridge. You can reach them by kayak or paddleboard on a calm day, and they’re worth the paddle. They’re three small, scrubby outcroppings with rocky shores and a surprising amount of bird life for a spot this close to the city.
Just respect the current. Skinner wasn’t wrong about that.
On a quiet evening on the water, with the current moving around the rocks, you can see how the legend got started.
The Three Sisters aren’t the area’s only legend. Maryland has the Goatman of Prince George’s County, and Fairfax County has the Bunny Man, who turns out to have been very real.
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On the AtlasNewSee where this happenedThe Three Sisters38.9040° N · 77.0820° W
