Short answers, pulled from the story.
The James River is 348 miles long from the confluence of the Cowpasture and Jackson Rivers in Botetourt County to the Chesapeake Bay. If the Jackson River headwater is included, the full length extends to 444 miles, making it the longest river in Virginia.
Virginia Governor Mills Godwin Jr. closed 100 miles of the James River to fishing in December 1975 due to contamination from the insecticide Kepone, dumped by plants in Hopewell, Virginia. The ban covered the stretch from Richmond to the Chesapeake Bay and remained in effect for 13 years.
The James River ghost fleet is a portion of the National Defense Reserve Fleet anchored near Fort Eustis, Virginia, consisting mostly of mothballed merchant vessels. Managed by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration, the ships can be activated within 20 to 120 days for national emergencies.
The Jamestown colonists who arrived in 1607 built the first permanent English settlement in the Americas along the James River, about 35 miles upstream from the Chesapeake Bay. For the colony's first 15 years, the navigable river served as the main highway for supply ships from England.
Yes. The James River is the last confirmed holdout for the nearly extirpated Atlantic sturgeon in the Chesapeake watershed. A survey in May 2007 counted 175 sturgeon remaining in the entire river, with 15 specimens exceeding five feet in length.
The most intense whitewater on the James River is a two-mile stretch that ends in downtown Richmond, where the river crosses the Fall Line. It produces class III conditions at normal water levels, rising to class IV above average flow, making it the only urban whitewater stretch of that intensity in the United States.