28th St Draw Bridge / Great Shiplock Canal

Built by the Norfolk and Southern Railroad in 1929, the 28th Street Draw Bridge served paper mills along the Pamunkey River at West Point while allowing ships from the James River to pass through the Great Shiplock, enter the Tidewater Connection Canal, and reach the tobacco industries along Dock Street. A moveable railroad bridge had stood here since at least the 1880s, beginning with a wooden swing-span bridge that moved horizontally from the shore. This bridge is a modified Scherzer Rolling Lift Bascule, a counterbalanced design that lifts and rocks backward so the rail span can be shorter, lighter, and easier to move. Its metal resisted rust because of a coating of black tar, it is 123 feet long, and it was designed to carry 60,000 pounds measured where the wheel of the locomotive drive axle contacts the tracks. In 1982 the span was welded shut and its machinery removed after commercial navigation on the canal had long ceased, though restoration remained possible if the Great Shiplock were repaired and the canal reopened as a yacht basin. The Great Shiplock Canal, dug by black slaves and Irish immigrants in the 1850s, once gave access to the docks, warehouses, and tobacco factories that lined Dock Street before there was an elevated railroad. This short canal linked the James River through a series of canal locks to the Kanawha Canal, connecting industrial Richmond with the wheat fields, farms, and iron smelters of Virginia's Great Valley. Sailing ships from Europe and northern cities unloaded manufactured goods to docks or canal boats and carried away hand-made cigars, barrels of cured tobacco, flour, horse shoes, nails, wire, and granite building stones. Along the canal's left shore, a long narrow island formed by joining a large island with sandbars, rocks, and smaller islands included Chapel Island, later the site of the Trigg Shipyard, while its western part now contains a large underground storm water retention basin.

Richmond, Virginia · United States