Planning A Route To Link Western Waters
The James River and Kanawha Canal was a project first proposed by George Washington when he was a young man surveying the mountains of western Virginia, which at the time consisted of what is today West Virginia, Kentucky, and to the north bank of the Ohio river. He was searching for a way to open a water route to the West. He believed that was the key to helping Virginia to become an economic powerhouse in what would become the United States quite a few years later.
In those times, waterways were the major highways of commerce. Early developments along the east coast of the colonies tended to end at the fall line (the head of navigation) of the rivers that emptied into the Atlantic directly (e.g., the Hudson River) or into its great Bays (e.g., the Delaware and the Chesapeake). Such early communities in Virginia included what we now know as Alexandria on the Potomac River, Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock River, Richmond and Lynchburg on the James River and Petersburg on the Appomattox River.
It was known by then that the Ohio River flowed into the Mississippi River, which flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. It was also known that the Allegheny Mountains formed the Eastern Continental Divide, and that there was apparently no inland waterway to sail between the two large watersheds.
By 1772, Washington had identified the Potomac and James rivers as the most promising locations for canals to be built to join with the western rivers. His preference was the James, as the Potomac led to rivers in land disputed with Pennsylvania and would be equally helpful to Maryland. The James could be aligned with the Kanawha River (in what is now West Virginia), and would best serve only Virginia, which was his priority. In 1785, the James River Company was formed, with George Washington as honorary president, to build locks around the falls at Richmond. By then, Washington was quite busy with the affairs of the new nation. In 1789 he would be elected its first president.
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