Appomattox River Heritage Trail

Along the Appomattox River at Petersburg, sites trace the area’s development from Native American fish dams and the 1646 relocation of the Appomattox Indians along Indian Town Creek, to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century towns, bridges, canals, mills, quarries, railroads, and industry. In 1784, Pocahontas, Blandford, Petersburg, and Ravenscroft were combined and incorporated as Petersburg, and Pocahontas became one of its principal communities with a large free black population. River crossings and transportation sites included early bridges at Pocahontas, Flea Island, and Narrow Falls, the Richmond and Petersburg railroad causeway of 1838, the 1909 Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Bridge, Union Station, and the South Side Depot, which by late 1864 stood on Lee’s last remaining supply line. The river also powered extensive industrial works, including canals begun in 1745 and 1791, canal basins filled with batteaux, water-powered mills along Canal Street, Merchant’s Mill Dam, Battersea Cotton Mill, Battersea Dam, and the Battersea and Ettrick High Canals, while Harvell Dam later produced electric power into the late twentieth century. Other sites include Peter Jones Trading Post, the Palladian villa Battersea built by Col. John Banister in 1768, and an abandoned granite quarry that supplied canal stone. During the Civil War, on April 2, 1865, three hundred Confederate soldiers crossed the Appomattox on a pontoon bridge on the march to Fort Gregg, where they held off five thousand Union forces in hand-to-hand combat for two hours while Lee’s army established new positions behind Indian Town Creek, after which all the Confederates were dead or wounded. Ferndale Park later occupied part of the Upper Appomattox Canal system completed between 1807 and 1810 and served as a major amusement park from 1910 to 1928.

Petersburg, Virginia · United States