The Shadow
The year was 1784. George Washington had resigned as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army the previous December after successfully leading the Colonies’ military campaign against the British. His career during the Revolution had been one of relentless effort and innovation:
holding together his exhausted, freezing troops through vicious Pennsylvania winters, and crossing an icy river to launch a surprise attack on his enemies. At night. On Christmas.
In September, bored after several months of relative inactivity, the 52-year-old former general left his home on the Potomac River and rode through the Allegheny Mountains to visit the Ohio valley. In addition to defending his large properties there from “land jobbers and speculators,”
Washington wanted to identify the best route connecting the eastern and western rivers.
Washington had been there before, many times. At age 17 he had been a surveyor and mapmaker on the western frontier. In three years, he completed two hundred surveys, gaining detailed knowledge of the mountains and the lands beyond, and was named Surveyor General of Virginia.
When the French opposed the eastern incursion into the central valleys, Washington joined the fight and was soon appointed to command the Virginia Regiment. He quickly ordered a chain of forts built to guard the frontier. The largest, Dickinson’s Fort (later Fort Young) at Covington,
held 250 soldiers who defended local settlers from the French and from hostile Indians.
Now, nearly thirty years later, Washington had returned to advance his long-held vision of physically and politically connecting America’s eastern and western regions by constructing a massive canal system across the Allegheny Mountains.
Back home at Mt. Vernon after his 680-mile journey, Washington sent a detailed report to the Governor of Virginia which included a recommendation to route the canal from the mouth of Dunlap Creek at Covington to the Greenbriar River. In January 1785, the Virginia Assembly
approved a measure for improving water navigation on the James River as far west as Botetourt County. In response, the James River Company was formed – the first commercial canal venture in the United States – with Washington as honorary president. The company’s first task for the
“Great Central American Water Line” was to build a series of locks past the falls at Richmond.
Constructing a canal in that era was difficult, demanding work done almost entirely by hand. The tools used were picks and shovels, horse-drawn wagons and scoops, and blasting powder to break apart rocks. Thousands of laborers did the actual digging, at various times including Irish
immigrants, black slaves, soldiers, and convicts. Lock systems were also built to bypass rapids.
In 1823, the Commonwealth of Virginia took over the James River Company, and for the next dozen years its operations were directed by the legislature. A new section was cut through the Blue Ridge Mountains as the canal expanded west. The Kanawha turnpike (now the Midland
Trail), spanned the mountains from Covington to the Ohio River, covering two hundred miles.
In 1835 a new organization, the James River and Kanawha Company, took charge of the effort with a modified charter: it would first complete the canal from Richmond to Covington, then build a railroad across the top of the ridge to below the falls of the Great Kanawha River, and
finally build infrastructure along the Great Kanawha to the Ohio River. By 1851 the canal was in operation all the way to Buchanan, 196.5 miles from Richmond. In 1854 the highest of 90 locks was completed just north of Eagle Rock, 970 feet above sea level. The canal had become
Virginia’s primary commerce line, transporting half a million pounds of cargo in 1860 alone.
Two primary types of boats served the canal. Flat-bottomed bateaux floated crops and goods down to Richmond and returned carrying French and English imports, furniture, dishes, and clothing. Packet boats were long, narrow craft that carried passengers and cargo. These were pulled along by mules and horses walking along towpaths next to the canal. The packet boats travelled at just four miles per hour, but cut the 8-day Richmond to Lynchburg trip to 33 hours.
In 1865, near the end of the Civil War, Union troops systematically destroyed ninety miles of the waterway, which Gen. Philip Sheridan had identified as “the great feeder of Richmond.” His army broke down locks and bridges and breached embankments to let the river flood the canal.
After the war, it became more cost-effective to build railways in its place, laying the railroad tracks along the former towpaths. The last portion of the Kanawha canal closed to traffic in 1877.
The Covington Virginian noted wistfully in July 1951 that if the canal had been completed, Covington “would have been the nerve center of a great commercial artery between the east and the west.” Hard as it is to imagine, Clifton Forge and Covington could both be seaports today.
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In the 1960s and 1970s, I-64 was laid out along the same basic track that George Washington had selected in 1784 for his grand, never-to-be-finished canal. It was still the best available route.
So, the next time you find yourself cruising along the Interstate, take a moment to remember an extraordinary man of the 1700s who explored these vast mountains on horseback, surveyed and assessed all the possible routes, and said to himself, “We can build a canal through here.”
