|
|
Part 2: Canal is integral--and changing--part of the Fredericksburg's landscape.
IT WAS THE Fredericksburg area's most colossal transportation project ever: a conduit for trade and commerce spanning 50 miles, involving thousands of laborers, the Virginia legislature, private investors and the City Council.
Interstate 95?
U.S. 1?
The railroad?
Nope. This engineering marvel was the Rappahannock River navigation system, canals built by hand over a 20-year span in the mid-1800s.
Few people here know that the region's original highway did not run north and south on a ribbon of asphalt and concrete, but east and west on the blue-green spine of the Rappahannock River--from Fredericksburg 50 miles upriver to the Fauquier County community of Waterloo at Carter's Run.
The most visible remains are a 1.8-mile section of canal in Fredericksburg, which runs along a popular cycling and jogging trail, and the crumbling ruins of locks and dams upstream.
| Download a song (in WAV format) about the Rappahannock Canal |
1811--Virginia legislature follows lead of other states to recommend Rappahannock Canal to open Rappahannock Valley to trade. 1816--First public stock sale in Rappahannock Navigation Co. held in Fredericksburg and counties upriver. But economy nose-dives and canal plans shelved. 1829--Fredericksburg City Council chips in to aid project. Rappahannock Navigation Co. finally raises enough capital. Parade through the city kicks off construction. 1829-1844--Chronic shortage of money allows completion of only parts of canal system originally planned to run from Fredericksburg 50 miles upstream to Carter's Run at Waterloo. Company folds, and again residents of Fredericksburg come to the aid of the project. 1845-1849--Virginia legislature approves another loan for the canal, which has consumed nearly $500,000 to date. Canal system is completed. 1852--State forecloses on Rappahannock Navigation Co., which is taken over by the city. End of canal era imminent: Orange & Alexandria Railroad reaches upper Rappahannock Valley; Little River Turnpike provides another land route to Alexandria ports. 1853--Assets of Rappahannock Co. are sold, but there's not enough money left to maintain the system of 47 locks, 20 dams, 15 miles of canal, and canal basin in Fredericksburg. Works are turned over to two farmers along the river, with hope that they will maintain it. The canal falls into disrepair. 1855--Fredericksburg Water Power Co. buys assets of Rappahannock Navigation Co., converts canal section in Fredericksburg from transportation to water power to supply mills. 1862--Sections of city canal become impediments to Union troops during Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg. 1910--Embrey Dam finished, diverts water, via canal, to Embrey Power Plant beside Caroline Street on the tidal Rappahannock. 1926--Virginia Electric and Power Co. acquires power plant and dam, operates power plant until shutting it down in early 1960s. 1969--City acquires Embrey Dam, power plant and 4,800 acres of riverfront land from Vepco. 1986--After years of planning, city opens Canal Park Trail. Source: The Rappahannock Scenic River Atlas; Historic Resources along the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers. |
A FORGOTTEN ERA
William E. Trout III, a trustee of the Virginia Canals & Navigations Society, believes the Rappahannock Canal is an important piece of history that should be remembered and preserved, even as it fades into obscurity.
"I think people have kind of forgotten about [canals]," said Trout, 66, a retired geneticist and historian who lives in Richmond. He's spent the better part of his adult life studying and writing about the navigation systems that once ran up every major river in Virginia. He wrote the "Rappahannock Scenic River Atlas," a guide to the history and route of the Rappahannock Canal.
He's finishing his 13th atlas detailing canals around the state. The section in Fredericksburg is one of the best preserved, he said. One reason is because the city owns much of the land along the canal route. Because of that, there is untapped potential.
Canals in other parts of Virginia are more well-known. The annual James River Batteau Festival in June, for example, draws hordes of tourists and re-enactors.
Trout said he's not sure why the Rappahannock Canal has been largely forgotten among the region's trove of historical sites, though preservation groups such as Friends of the Rappahannock, local historians and canal history buffs have been quietly documenting and cataloging the ruins for many years.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
The Rappahannock Canal is the stuff of legend: great expectations, hard times, gold fever and big, bold failure.
The water highway was conceived in the early 1800s when farmers and mill owners up-stream were desperate for a faster way to get their goods to Fredericksburg and beyond.
Jack Edlund, 56, a local archaeologist and historian, said the canal was a critical link for the city and outlying farms and mills. Situated on the fall line, the last stop for oceangoing vessels, Fredericksburg was the hub of the wheel of commerce.
The Rappahannock "was the I-95 of the 1800s," said Edlund, owner of Salvage Archaeology in Fredericksburg. "These days, we ride in climate-controlled pods. In the olden days, you rode a horse, walked, or went on the river. Here, everything generates from the river."
Canals were the best way for people upland to move their goods to market, and to get European goodies--glass, upscale household items, exotic food--in return, Edlund said.
It must have been hugely important in its day, he said. "When you go down along the river and see a section of canal wall, you know that somebody spent a lot of time and money on it."
By 1812, Fredericksburg had fallen behind other major port cities on the East Coast. City fathers were competing with their counterparts in Alexandria and Richmond for inland trade. There were wharves connected to warehouses and stores all along the waterfront here.
Fredericksburg, then a city of 4,000 residents, had a burgeoning economy, with sales of grain, tobacco and flour amounting to about $4 million a year.
"I compare that time to a cowboy town, and instead of cowboys, you had sailors"--people connected inexorably with the river, Edlund said.
Erik Nelson, Fredericksburg's senior planner who prepared the city's historic resources guide, believes that gold--which had been discovered upriver--was a big reason why the canal was built.
Nelson examined gold production reports during the canal era and saw a correlation: Mining peaked with canal use in the 1840s, and petered out after the 1849 gold rush in California and with the arrival of the railroad. Local government at the time, he said, was very conservative. "So it seemed strange that the city would be putting up money" to move ordinary commodities. "It's not that they needed a canal to haul gold out, but mining required all kinds of equipment and supplies" which, conveniently, were available from city merchants.
Whatever the motivation, the Rappahannock navigation system would become the biggest construction project ever attempted here, and one of the biggest financial busts of the century. It would even play a deadly role in the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg.
A SLOW START
The canal was endorsed by the legislature in 1811. But it would take another five years before the first shares of the Rappahannock Navigation Co. would be sold.
Even then, Trout said, not everyone was on board. Some merchants and farmers upstream were wary of funding the first stages of construction way down in Fredericksburg.
Those misgivings, combined with a souring national economy, put the navigation project on hold until 1829, when enough bonds were finally sold.
That was a cause for celebration in Fredericksburg on Jan. 21 of that year when construction began. It was preceded by a grand procession downtown in which Masons, clergy, townspeople and city fathers marched down Princess Anne and Caroline streets to begin construction of the canal basin, then the terminus of the canal at the corner of Canal and Prince Edward streets.
In his 1967 American University master's thesis on the canal, Donald S. Callaham described the scene: "After the ceremony at the site of construction, the leaders of the venture retired to Blackburn's Tavern for a banquet."
It would probably be the last time anyone would drink a toast to the canal because it would take another nine long years before any meaningful construction was completed within the city. Investors had to go back to the council--and to the legislature--three times for more money over the next 15 years.
By the time the project was completed in 1849, close to $500,000 had been spent--a fortune in those days. The venture never made a profit, and by 1853, the Rappahannock Navigation Co. went belly-up--the victim of poor planning, Trout said. The final blow was the arrival of the Orange & Alexandria Railroad, which began hauling much of the goods produced in the Rappahannock valley.
By 1855, parts of the system were already in disrepair, and the lower section in the city was purchased by Fredericksburg Water Power Co., which used the canal to power run mills along the riverfront.
Seven years later, during the Battle of Fredericksburg, the canal was a deadly barrier that exposed Union troops to concentrated Confederate fire.
The project was an audacious undertaking: 47 locks, 20 dams and 15 miles of canal to lift boats a total of 323 feet higher upriver to the last stop in Fauquier.
According to Callaham, an ad in The Herald newspaper May 27, 1829, offered laborers $5 to $7 a month to work on the canal. Pay would include, "as much bread, meat, fish and molasses as can be consumed three times a day, with some spirits." Irishmen, skilled craftsmen and slaves did much of the back-breaking work. Slaveowners were assured that the dangers of canal work was not greater than on a farm.
One of the larger sections is located at the confluence of the Rapidan and Rappahannock rivers, about 10 miles upriver from Fredericksburg. There, a massive crib dam--a wood-timber shell filled with heavy stones--was built above the rapids. That created a large pond, connected to locks, where boats could pass through. The wooden lock gates operated by water pressure after a heavy iron sluice valve was opened or shut.
The dam is long gone, but its huge stones are still strewn across the river. Along the Spotsylvania County shore, Lock 9 and a section of canal run for well over a mile.
"This was before steam drills and dynamite. It was all hand-worked, with wheelbarrows, shovels and hand drills," Trout said. Blasting was particularly dangerous. "We know of two cases where people were blown up. They'd pour some black powder" into holes drilled in the rock, seal them with clay, "light a wick and run as fast as they could."
The cut stones were dragged by mule-drawn sleds, rolled on logs, or floated on barges to the work area where they were set with mortar.
Hal Wiggins, an amateur historian, paddler and biologist with the Army Corps of Engineers field office in Fredericksburg, remembers the first time he saw Lock 9, which blends into the riverbank under a thick canopy of trees.
"I was overwhelmed.You are out here and you try to wrap your mind around how it worked," Wiggins said on a recent canoe trip to the site. Thousands of paddlers pass the ruins each year without ever seeing them.
END OF THE LINE
Rappahannock bateaux were probably similar to the ones being used on the Potomac and James river canals--shallow-draft oak boats measuring 65 by 9 feet, and capable of carrying 200 or more barrels of cargo. They were steered with long oars protruding from a rounded bow and stern.
Trout's river atlas includes an excerpt from a memoir by John Edward Armstrong of Waterloo, whose father helped oversee part of the canal's construction in Fauquier.
Armstrong wrote: "As a boy I remember seeing the men on the canal boats poling the boats and singing their songs--two men on each side,There were platforms or walkways on the side of the boat where the men stood; there were no tow paths on the canal. In the center of the boat were the living quarters."
The float from Waterloo to Fredericksburg could take days because of the dams and locks along the way. A farmer or merchant upstream might carry a load of flour, wheat, corn and lumber, to sell for seed, salt fish, lime, whiskey, tar and bricks.
Just above Fredericksburg, bateaux would enter a lock where the Embrey Dam now stands, and go across town, under the Falmouth Bridge, to the canal basin, next to what is now the Dorothy Hart Community Center. There, the boats would unload and restock for the return trip.
In the decade before the Civil War, canal use peaked. Callaham reported that batteau tolls for the year 1850 were $5,648. Goods shipped to Fredericksburg included: 25,859 barrels of flour, 34,356 bushels of wheat, 2,748 bushels of corn, 348,221 board feet of lumber, 1,183 cords of wood, 300 bushels of oats, 616,649 pounds of merchandise and 39,516 pieces of barrel timber.
By 1860, the Rappahannock Canal was obsolete, Trout said. "If there had been huge coal mines [upstream], or if the canal had gone all the way up into the Shenandoah Valley, it probably would have lasted longer."
Other canals around the nation would also succumb to advances in technology and a changing world, Trout said.
"They did the job until a different transportation mode came along."
For more information about the Rappahannock navigation system:
The Rappahannock Scenic River Atlas, detailing historic sites on the river and its branches. Prepared for the Virginia Canals & Navigations Society by William E. Trout III. Copies available for $5 at Virginia Outdoor Center, 371-5085.
Virginia Canals & Navi-gations Society, on the Web at: organizations.rockbridge.net/canal.
Historic Resources Along the Rappahannock and Rapidan Rivers (1997), prepared by the Fredericksburg Office of Planning and Community Development, 372-1179.
Friends of the Rappahannock, river preservation group, on the Web at: for.community point.org or call 373-3448.