Virginia’s new whitewater feature

One of Danville, Virginia’s oldest commercial structures and cultural sites is set for readaptation and development into a whitewater feature. Looking back across two centuries of commerce, conflict, and river life, Jonathan Hackworth traces the story of the Danville Canal. Once a lifeline of mills and batteaux, the waterway is now set for another transformation, this time as a whitewater feature.

The historic Danville Canal is being preserved and reimagined, giving new life to a structure that has shaped the city for more than two centuries. The canal was built in 1794 by John Barnett, a local businessman and plantation owner, as a water source for his grist mill. In 1795, Barnett entered into partnership with Halcott Towns, a Halifax County lawyer. When Towns died, his heirs sued Barnett for neglect of the mill and for debts owed. That lawsuit dragged on from 1806 into the 1820s. By 1816, the mill left receivership and fell into the hands of Benjamin W. S. Cabell and William Lewis.

That same year, Virginia and North Carolina renewed their joint-venture partnership to develop the Roanoke River and its tributaries for transportation and access to the Dismal Swamp and coastal markets in Wilmington. In 1817, North Carolina’s branch of the company was given complete control of development in both states, consolidating their efforts. The Roanoke Navigation Company was formed, and in 1821 it signed a contractm called an indenture, with Lewis and Cabell, filed at the Pittsylvania County Courthouse.

With the help of engineer Hamilton Fulton and fifty enslaved laborers, the Roanoke Navigation Company converted the canal from a millrace into a bateaux channel around the “Great Falls” of Danville. This work was completed between 1822 and 1826, and the first bateaux traversed the canal in December 1825.

The canal remained in the company’s hands until the 1860s and had fallen into disrepair by 1877. From 1826 until foreclosure, its operations depended on the work of slaves and freedmen. River life was both difficult and rewarding. Slaves sometimes sought this labor for the relative freedom it offered, while freedmen often rose to captain batteaux, conducting business with the literacy such roles required. The river carried risks, from pirates to the dangers of smuggling enslaved people north on the Underground Railroad.

In 1877, the Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the canal as part of a national initiative to improve waterways. By then, a flood in 1870 had destroyed the wing dam that fed the canal, and the locks no longer worked.

The lands eventually came under Casper Rodenhizer, who owned the stretch from Union Street Bridge to the old grist mill. Management later passed to his son-in-law Thomas Jefferson Corbin. In 1882, the canal was widened and improved, the wing dam replaced by Union Dam, and a new 13-gate system installed. That same year, Corbin sold the water rights to Thomas Benton Fitzgerald and the other owners of Riverside Cotton Mill. Morotock Mill was also built along the canal beside the foundry site that later became the Danville Power Department.

By 1894, Riverside Cotton Mills had contracted James A. Ordaway of Woburn, Massachusetts, to line 1,700 feet of the canal with stone. Completed in 1895, the canal then powered a box factory, an electric-light house, a foundry, Morotock and Riverside Cotton Mills, and a grist mill.

Over time, Riverside Cotton Mills acquired both banks and all rights to the canal. In 1920, Mill No. 8, known locally as Aberthaw Mill, was built on its upper reaches. The canal remained a source of power until its partial closure in 1970 during Danville’s “Urban Renewal” projects.

Now, 231 years after Barnett first cut it into the river, the Danville Canal is set for another transformation, this time into a whitewater feature that will serve the city in a very different way.