Beginning around 1748, Richmond coal was shipped to the major coastal cities of Colonial America for smithing and home heating, and as wood grew scarcer coal found a growing market. Early mines lay just north and south of the James River, but the fall line east of the city made shipment to Tidewater and to schooners difficult, while wagon transport over rough unimproved roads damaged the soft bituminous coal and risked bogging down in mud. Coal moved on the upper James in bateaux using sluices blasted through rock ridges and improved with small wing dams to create safer channels. To provide a safer water route through the falls, the James River Company was chartered in 1785 with George Washington as honorary President, and in 1789 the Upper Canal at Westham and the Lower Canal to downtown Richmond opened as the first operating canal system with locks in America. By the beginning of the 19th century, Richmond Basin coal production had become lucrative, and mine owners increasingly relied on engineering to improve productivity and access to market. On the north side of the James, the Tuckahoe Canal connected the Tuckahoe and Guyton pits to the James River Canal, and this connection was improved by the Tuckahoe and James River Rail Road in 1835. After 1820, the east-west canal that became the James River and Kanawha Canal was improved and eventually extended 196 miles along the north side of the James. South-side mines could not easily use that canal system, so other routes were built: in 1807 the Manchester Turnpike, the first paved road in Virginia, ran thirteen miles from Falling Creek on old Buckingham Road to the port of Manchester, and in 1828 the Chesterfield Railroad, Virginia's first railroad, was chartered as a thirteen mile gravity and mule powered line from the mines in what is now the Midlothian Village area to the Manchester docks. Completed in 1831 with 160 cars in operation, it sharply reduced coal transport costs and was among the world's most profitable railroads until the steam-powered Richmond and Danville replaced it in 1850. Richmond Basin coal exports declined in the mid-19th century as Pennsylvania coal fields and their transportation networks developed, but the Civil War revived production because coal was urgently needed at Tredegar Iron Works to fuel the manufacture of armaments and ironclad ships for the Confederate army and navy.