Kayaking for fun.....

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   ...and exploring!

Very very interesting things I've found out since my kayaking trip down Goose Creek in Loudon County, VA. 

Turns out that back in the 1700-1800's there were a ton of grain mills that were situated along the banks of both Goose Creek and it's tributary the Little River. Mills such as Aldie Mill and George Kephart's "Elizabeth Mills" with it's adjoining town were just a few of the water-powered mills that were along the creek. It turns out that some (possibly) perfectly sane individuals with lots of money to spend were convinced by George Carter and a few other investors that canals were going to be the end-all-be-all of interstate transportation in that day and age. The goal of the endeavor was to allow the mills to load their grain into barges which would then be floated down the navigable sections of the streams and down the canals and locks on the unnavigable sections to the Potomac river above Great Falls and then across the river to the C&O Canal where it would be floated down to DC and Alexandria where it could either be sold at market or exported for a greater selling price. Normally, the trip from what is now Leesburg, VA to DC and Alexandria took two days by horse and cart and allowed only limited carrying capacity thus capping mill production at a lower level than full output. The theory was rather sound and canals were all the rage (the C&O canal was proving fairly successful on its completed sections and the French were trying to build a big one down in Panama after the success of the Suez Canal in Egypt). Little did they know, but within a few years of starting to build the Goose Creek And Little River Navigation Company's canal and locks system, the entire Northern Virginia country side would be crisscrossed by various upstart railroads that would ultimately doom the Goose Creek Canal as surely as railroads doomed the C&O, Erie, and other canals. 

It took the company almost 15 years to complete the canal and lock systems that they did (10 years went by between planning and construction alone). By the time they finished the system as far as it could possibly go, they wound up 8 miles shy of the 20 miles of waterway they had promised the investors and mill operators. To make things even worse, by the year of it's completion in 1854, the entirety of Goose Creek and it's canals had become virtually unnavigable due to an unseasonably dry summer which littered the creek's normally navigable sections with sand bars that blocked almost any possible attempt to float even an unladen boat down the system. 

As it turns out, the president of the canal company refused to pay the builders and planners anything until they could prove the system navigable, so they built a flat-bottomed cargo barge which was alternately floated through the locks and deep-water pools of the creek and hauled across the sand bars by slaves. Upon the boat reaching the end of the system at Kephart's Landing on the Potomac, the sum of design and construction was paid out. Due to the readily available access to railroads, the single boat that was hauled over the sand to reach the river would be the only vessel to ever travel the entire canal system. In 1857 in the midst of a heavy depression and only 3 years after it's final locks were completed, the Goose Creek and Little River Navigation Company folded. The company's books showed a positive balance of $1.95 for a project that took over $100,000 of investor and state funding to complete.

So, why did I do all of this reading? Well, when Erin and I portaged around a Class III+ rapid that day, we found that we were walking around the #4 locks of the system. These things were MASSIVE. Made entirely out of Seneca Sandstone (Brownstone) they stand at least 12' above the creek bed at the top and the stream-wide weir dam that channeled the water to the locks was still mostly intact (a breach in the center of the dam and it's ensuing rubble is what forms the rather technical and difficult rapid). I found it to be an absolutely enthralling and astounding fixture along that section of the creek. Apparently almost all of the other locks (there were 7 total) and mill ruins are accessible from the creek. I'm looking forward to going out and exploring more this summer. I'll take lots of pictures to post later.

Oh, and you can get an idea of the size of the #4 locks by looking at the satellite image from google maps located HERE.

The locks/canal are to the west side of the creek. Zoom in as far as you can. The first bit of white-water is where the breach in the weir dam is located. If you look left from there, you should see a trench-like structure running parallel to the creek with a somewhat defined entrance leading into it at a curve from the left bank of the stream just upstream from the weir. (The stream flows South to North)

If you keep following the creek up-stream from there and use the map found in the article on the canal system located in the Washington Post you'll be able to locate several other old weir dams where mill ponds were created from the creek. Use the article map to give you an approximate location to look at on google maps and you should be able to spot some. 

TL;DR can suck it!