The water is pushed down Haxall Canal by a low dam stretching across the river soon it will turn turbines to make the electricity that powers the trolley systems winding around the city’s hills. Rails made at Tredegar have been laid on the old canal towpath, and the mills will soon burn down for the last time. It is the day of steam engines, especially of the railroads. The scene after the war, in the 1880s, shows no evidences of bucolic peace. Its powerful visible flow has been acknowledged and set to work. Both canals mark the end of the lazy days preferred by Cooke, when the river was perceived as little more than a picturesque, fluid highway. Here the river has been harnessed by forces less gentle than the artist’s brush. The plain below actually was cut by two canals–one near the hills, the James River Canal, which both carried boats and tempered hot iron, and one near the river, the Haxall Canal, which channeled water over the wheels of the Haxall flour mill. Had the artist been willing to peer more closely, he would have had to paint a far busier and noisier world. Even the river shows little trace of its loud rapids. In the background, small buildings clutter the city’s hills, shadowed by an enlarged Capitol. Browsing cattle and trees in the left foreground emphasize rural tranquility even the boat is pointed downstream. I must strain to find the tiny mills by the river or the Armory beside the canal, and no smoke rises from the Tredegar Iron Works hidden behind the hill. But I notice that accuracy and proportion have been sacrificed for the artist’s vision of pastoral peace. I join the ladies in the right foreground who gaze at the James River Canal curving gracefully at the foot of grassy hills. Cooke, artist, whose aquatint landscape of the 1830s was frequently reproduced with a print engraved by W. But since no one realized how drastically it would change, no one felt this river landscape needed recording.įor a moment I borrow the perspective of one G. However it originated, giant, water-loving trees must have ruled over the rich soil of this natural amphitheater. Or perhaps the currents and floods of the river deposited sediment on this flat land. Perhaps the hills circling the plain were once cliffs, worn down by rains and cut out by streams carrying the soil down beside the river. The prints and histories which usually serve as my guides through time are of little help in recreating this scene in its wild state. I too am caught in the fluid currents of the past, but what I watch is a people’s vision and revision of their river. Here, where Memory’s War Memorial stands open to river breezes, is my vantage point on two centuries along the Fall Line. Her back is turned on the semicircular river plain lying at the foot of the hill, long an arena where people have acted out the ways in which they see their river. High above the Falls, north of Belle Isle on what was once called Belvidere Hill, towers a statue of Memory, a grieving woman carved in white marble, protected by walls which are etched with the names of Virginia’s recent war dead.
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