The Roanoke Navigation Company opened the upper Dan River here for batteau traffic in the 1820s, and the towns of Leaksville, present-day Eden, and Madison became river ports. During the antebellum era, farmers shipped their produce downstream to markets in eastern North Carolina and Virginia, and on the return trip the bateaux carried goods for town merchants. When the Richmond and Danville Railroad reached Danville, Virginia, in 1856, batteau traffic decreased below that point. After the Civil War began in 1861, batteau owners continued shipping goods on the river. In Danville, Confederate authorities established hospitals, prisons for captured Union soldiers, and a large quartermaster commissary. Early in 1863, Confederates commandeered Dan River batteaux to transport iron and large quantities of grain and other foodstuffs from Madison and Leaksville to the Danville commissary, where the railroad carried supplies onward to Confederate forces in Virginia. In the summer of 1863, the Danville firm of Jones, Neal, and Farrar contracted with the quartermaster to furnish coal for the prisons and hospitals there. Because coal was scarce in the South, the company reopened the Wade Coal Mines two miles west of Leaksville. In 1863-1864, Union prisoners from Danville dug a large quantity of coal there, and it was loaded on nearby bateaux and shipped downstream to Danville. Leaksville Landing, one of the batteau docks, stood a short distance upstream from here.