The Roanoke Canal trail begins at Oakwood Avenue Parking Lot and passes sites that reflect both the canal’s industrial past and the area’s natural features. At the western trailhead near Roanoke Rapids Lake Day Use Area, visitors find recreation at a lake built in the early 1950s for electricity production and recreation, while the original Roanoke Canal continues about two miles west beneath the lake. Along the route are an original stone culvert for spring and natural drainage, Rochelle Pond and Dam as a major storm water retention basin and habitat for ducks and waterfowl, and remnants of the massive bulkhead for the shorter, deeper power canal beside the longer navigation canal. The trail reaches the Roanoke Canal Museum in the old powerhouse on the navigation canal, where locks once used to lower loaded batteaux can still be seen, and continues past the site where the nation’s first Kraft pulp mill began operating as the Roanoke Rapids Paper Manufacturing Company in 1909. Other points include an old stone structure that may have been used for surge control, views of the Roanoke River from the River Road access area, the crossing of Interstate 95 over a canal once serving as the interstate transportation of the 1800s, a flood spillway returning canal water to the river, and a pond created by gravel harvesting in the mid 20th century. Near the Aqueduct access, the trail leads to a lush lowland forest walk and to the aqueduct built in the early 1800s to span Chockoyette Creek, one of the best preserved examples of early 19th century canal architecture. Near Weldon are a Confederate graveyard and a town once known as Weldons Landing or Weldons Orchard that served as a major railroad hub for the Wilmington Weldon Railroad, with remnants of old trestles still standing. Farther on, Riverside Mill survives as a renovated early 1900s cotton mill once powered by the Roanoke Canal. At River Falls Park, where the canal terminated and entered the Roanoke River east of the rapids, old locks supported grist mills, an iron foundry, and two cotton gins, and a large corn mill built in 1890 still stands amid the present boat landing, park, and observation deck over Weldon Rapids.