First thoughts. . .

So, let’s start where Richmond started, with the river.

It’s reasonably common knowledge that Richmond’s location was first staked out by the earliest Englishmen coming upriver from Jamestown. In the opening lines of Virginius Dabney’s “Richmond: The Story of a City” he describes Captain Christopher Newport and his men planting a wooden cross at the Falls, “near the heart of today’s downtown.” They were looking for gold, Dabney says. Probably so, since most English explorers of the time, jealous of Spain’s windfall in South America, were hoping to find a new source of the stuff.

Instead of gold, they had found granite. Richmond’s location is due to a geologic formation called the “fall line” — a point at which the hard rock of the mountainous regions gives way to the softer stuff of the coastal plains. Simon Winchester, in his excellent book “The Men Who United the States,” points out that this line, snaking up the East Coast, defined where many cities were founded.

“Hints of the origins can still be spotted, though,” Winchester writes. “Invariably there will be a bridge in each city, spanning the river that brought the first boatmen here hundreds of years before. Cast your eyes over the parapets, and the stream below will quite probably be running through the bridge fast and furious. This is where the first sailors stopped, and the speed and temper of the river are the reason why.”

Baltimore, Washington, Wilmington, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia, even Montreal, all owe their locations to this barrier encountered by the earliest explorers.

In Richmond, the James River runs fast through a granite riverbed, easily observed from Belle Isle, that contains the only Class III and IV rapids within a city limits in the U.S. You can see where granite was historically mined in the abandoned quarries of Belle Isle, and this perenially useful stone is still drawn from the ground within a short distance of Captain Newport’s first stop in 1607.

That’s how it started, and why. Let’s see where it goes. . .

 

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