Weldon embraces a local fishing legend centered on Jonathan Jackson, who on a foggy March morning in 1904 launched a wooden boat with fresh-netted herring near the falls and hooked what he believed was an enormous female rockfish near the big rock. He fought the fish for more than two hours as it ran toward the falls, tangled around rocks, pulled his boat downstream, and appeared longer than his boat when it neared the surface. Jackson tried to bring it toward a sandbar and net it, but the line snapped and the fish escaped. Exhausted and in pain, he returned to shore and told others of the battle, but many doubted him and suggested he had hooked a large catfish. After going to a pub and renewing his claim that the fish would have been a world record, he collapsed and died from a massive heart attack. Jackson became a local legend for losing the giant rockfish, and the tale has been kept alive for more than a century as part of Weldon's rockfishing identity. The account also ties this identity to the spring migration of striped bass from the upper Chesapeake Bay to the spawning beds of the Roanoke River and notes that Weldon was officially recognized by the North Carolina General Assembly as the Rockfish Capital of the World on March 2, 2009.