James River

• 1. Introduction

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  The James River cuts 348 miles across the state of Virginia, from where the Cowpasture and Jackson Rivers meet in the Appalachian Mountains all the way to the Chesapeake Bay. If you trace the longer of its two headwaters, the Jackson River, the full length stretches to 444 miles, making it Virginia's longest river. What makes this river remarkable is not just its size but its layered life: a corridor where English settlers landed in 1607, where tobacco built an empire, where a toxic chemical nearly killed the water for a generation, and where Atlantic sturgeon still swim today in numbers so small they can be counted by hand. The questions worth asking about the James River are not simply geographic. How did one river shape the entire economic and political character of a colony? What happened when the people who depended on it poisoned it? And what does it mean that, in a river running through the heart of a major American city, you can still find fish that are nearly extinct everywhere else on the continent?

• 2. The River That Named a Colony

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  Before any English ship arrived, the people who lived east of the Fall Line called this river the Powhatan River, after the Powhatan nation that occupied the surrounding land. When colonists arrived in 1607 and built their settlement about 35 miles upstream from the Chesapeake Bay, they renamed it James, after King James I of England. That renaming was more than a formality. It planted a flag, claimed a water highway, and signaled that everything the river touched was now, in the colonists' view, theirs to use.

  For the first 15 years of the Jamestown settlement, the navigable stretch of the river functioned as the main road of colonial Virginia. Supply ships from England moved up and down it, bringing emigrants and equipment. But for the first five of those years, despite hopes of finding gold, those ships went home largely empty. The financial backers of the Virginia Company of London saw little return on their investment.

  John Rolfe changed that in 1612. A businessman, Rolfe successfully cultivated a non-native strain of tobacco that found a ready market in England. Within years, plantations with their own wharves were lining the banks below the falls at Richmond, and large hogsheads of cured tobacco were being rolled down to the water and shipped across the Atlantic. Port towns sprang up at Warwick, Bermuda Hundred, City Point, Claremont, Scotland, and Smithfield. The Virginia Company's colonial venture, which had teetered on financial collapse, became profitable.

• 3. Canals, Rails, and the Fall Line

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  Richmond sits at the Fall Line, the geological boundary where the river drops from the rocky Piedmont to the flat coastal plain. Ocean-going ships could not pass that point, and this hard limit shaped every commercial ambition that followed. For goods from the Piedmont and the Great Valley regions, smaller craft carried produce down to Richmond and Manchester, passing through port towns like Lynchburg, Scottsville, Columbia, and Buchanan.

  Ambitions reached further west. Planners envisioned the James River and Kanawha Canal as a route linking Virginia to the Ohio Valley, connecting the river's navigable sections to the Kanawha River, a tributary of the Ohio. For the steepest mountain section, the James River and Kanawha Turnpike was built to carry wagons and stagecoaches over the gap where water could not go.

  The canal was never finished. In the mid-19th century, railroads proved faster and cheaper, and the canal's construction stopped at Eagle Rock. By 1873, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway had completed a line between Richmond and Huntington, West Virginia, connecting to the Ohio River and making the canal economically obsolete. Within decades, the Richmond and Alleghany Railroad was laid directly on the eastern portion of the canal's old towpath, and that rail line was absorbed into the C&O within ten years. The same corridor that once carried canal barges now moves West Virginia coal to export piers at Newport News.

• 4. Kepone and the Poisoned Estuary

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  During the 1960s and 1970s, the Allied Signal Company and the LifeSciences Product Company operated plants in Hopewell, Virginia, and both mishandled and dumped Kepone, the brand name for the insecticide chlordecone. The chemical spread downstream through the James River estuary, contaminating large stretches of water and rendering sections of the river effectively dead.

  Businesses and restaurants along the river lost income. Fishing communities that had worked the water for generations watched their livelihoods disappear. In December 1975, Virginia Governor Mills Godwin Jr. responded by closing 100 miles of the river to fishing, from Richmond all the way to the Chesapeake Bay. That ban stayed in force for 13 years.

  Recovery came slowly and imperfectly. A decade's worth of silt had settled above the contaminated riverbed, and that accumulated sediment helped dilute and bury the chemical over time, reducing concentrations gradually. The cleanup that followed in the 1970s and beyond did not erase the contamination but reduced it enough that the river became functional again. The 13-year fishing ban stands as one of the longest river closures in American history, a direct measure of how thoroughly a single industrial decision can break a shared natural resource.

• 5. Regional Cooperation and Recovery

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  The Chesapeake Bay Agreement of 1983 brought together the governors of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, the mayor of the District of Columbia, and the EPA. Together, they established baseline environmental protections for the bay and its watershed and committed to regional cooperation on cleanup. That original agreement became the foundation for what is now known as the Chesapeake Bay Program, an ongoing regional partnership that has guided restoration work for decades.

  The James River's watershed covers 10,432 square miles and, as of the 2000 census, held a population of 2.5 million people. About four percent of the watershed's surface is open water. Larger tributaries feeding the tidal portion include the Appomattox, Chickahominy, Warwick, Pagan, and Nansemond Rivers, each carrying runoff from its own sub-watershed into the main channel. The upper watershed drains into the river from the Appalachian Mountains, with the Cowpasture and Jackson Rivers converging near Iron Gate on the border of Alleghany and Botetourt counties.

• 6. Sturgeon, Catfish, and Whitewater

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  In May 2007, a survey of the James River counted 175 Atlantic sturgeon remaining in the entire river. Of those, 15 specimens exceeded five feet in length. The Atlantic sturgeon is listed as nearly extirpated across the Chesapeake watershed, and the James River is the last confirmed location where the species still holds on.

  Blue catfish in the lower river reach average sizes of 20 to 30 pounds, with frequent catches exceeding 50 pounds. Fishing, kayaking, canoeing, swimming, and hiking draw visitors to the river throughout the warm months, from the Blue Ridge Mountains headwaters all the way down to Richmond.

  At Richmond, the river does something unusual. A two-mile stretch ending in the heart of the city passes over the Fall Line and generates class III rapids under normal water levels, rising to class IV when the river runs high. Whitewater of that intensity within sight of a city skyline exists nowhere else in the country. Below the Fall Line east of Richmond, the river widens and slows, becoming better suited for water skiing and larger boat recreation. At its mouth near Newport News Point, the Elizabeth and Nansemond Rivers join the James to form the harbor of Hampton Roads, where a channel runs south and east into the Chesapeake Bay and out to the Atlantic Ocean.

• 7. The Ghost Fleet

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  Anchored in the James River near Fort Eustis, Virginia, sits a portion of the National Defense Reserve Fleet, known informally as the James River fleet or the ghost fleet. The fleet consists of mothballed ships, mostly merchant vessels, held in readiness to be activated within 20 to 120 days. They can be called into service during national emergencies, whether military crises or commercial shipping disruptions.

  The fleet is managed by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Maritime Administration. It is distinct from Navy reserve fleets, which hold warships; the James River fleet is made up of civilian cargo vessels. The river that once carried tobacco hogsheads to English markets and canal barges toward the Ohio Valley now quietly stores a reserve of ships waiting for a crisis that may never come, or one that might arrive without warning.