In the 1700s and 1800s, it was common for a crew to bring goods down the James River to Richmond on a long, hand-poled boat called a bateau.
If all goes well, volunteers will re-create history this month by shooting the river’s rapids in a bateau to haul materials to a James River Park construction project.
“As a history lover, I love the idea of using a bateau to deliver heavy goods on the James River like they did 150 years ago,” said Andrew McRoberts, a member of a volunteer group behind the project.
The group, called James River Hikers-Hiking with History, plans to build a wooden boardwalk over a swampy, muddy section of trail leading to Texas Beach, a scenic spot on the north bank just downriver from Maymont.
“There is nothing in the James River Park system that is as messy and ugly and treacherous as that (muddy section) is,” said Dennis Bussey, founder of the hiking group.
People are also reading…
Michael Burton, the city’s trails manager, said the boardwalk project has “been on my radar screen for several years. The challenge was always getting the materials to the site.”
Reaching the site without a boat means parking at a lot by Texas Avenue, hiking down a hill, crossing a bridge over a railroad track, going down stairs and walking some more — a tough, quarter-mile slog for someone hauling lumber.
McRoberts thought of using a bateau. Bussey ran into someone who knew Andrew Shaw, a 25-year-old Charlottesville carpenter who owns a bateau. Bussey contacted Shaw, and a strategy emerged.
Shaw plans to put in his boat at Riverside Meadows, a grassy area just upriver from Pony Pasture Rapids on the river’s south bank. That’s the only place open enough to get the 43-foot-long, 7-foot-wide bateau from a trailer into the river, Shaw said.
Shaw and his four to six crew members plan to pole the boat about 3½ miles, much of it through rapids, to Reedy Creek, a south bank spot where there is truck access. The bateau crew will pick up the materials there and ferry them north to Texas Beach, almost directly across the river.
The ferry job probably will take several trips. Then Shaw and his crew will pole the boat back, against the river and its rapids, to Riverside Meadows.
“It’s hard, but it’s doable,” Shaw said.
Shaw made news in 2012 when he and friends took a trip commemorating an 1812 river and overland journey by Chief Justice John Marshall. Shaw and his crew poled the bateau up the James from just west of Richmond to close to the West Virginia line, hauled it across the Allegheny Mountains, floated down the Greenbrier River and shot the rapids of the New River.
Marshall had been surveying a canal route from Richmond to the Ohio River. Shaw was looking for an adventure “that would draw attention to the historic and ecological value of our rivers.”
Shaw’s bateau, the Mary Marshall, is named after Marshall’s wife.
The Richmond bateau trip is scheduled for Oct. 18. The plan is for volunteers to build the boardwalk on several Saturdays after that.
There is one big “if.”
Shaw said he can make the trip if the river is running between 4½ and 6 feet high, measured at a gauge near the Huguenot Bridge. But the river is running well below 4 feet. That means the crew needs rain.
Low water on the 18th simply means pushing back the project, Bussey said. “Even if it doesn’t happen then, it will happen.”
Bateaux — pronounced bat-TOES and sometimes spelled batteaux — frequently brought tobacco and other goods down the James from well above Lynchburg to downtown Richmond from the late 1700s to about the mid-1800s, said amateur historian Bill Trout.
While the bateaux ran rapids above Richmond, they were able to skirt the rapids here by moving down two small canals along the north bank, said Trout, past president of the Virginia Canals and Navigations Society, a group devoted to the history of our waterways.
Hardy crew members poled the bateaux back upriver, carrying such items as furniture and clothes.
Those bateaux were about 70 feet long and 7 to 8 feet wide, Trout said. Today’s reproductions are made shorter so they can be hauled on trailers.
Mule- and horse-drawn freight and passenger boats, traveling the James River and Kanawha Canal, began replacing bateaux about the mid-1800s, Trout said. Later in the century, railroads replaced those boats.
“You didn’t have to go in the river any more and risk your life and cargo on the river,” Trout said.
Bateaux have been used in recent river cleanups above Richmond, but the Mary Marshall’s voyage may be the first case in a long time of one carrying important cargo through the city.
Trout, 77, was delighted to hear about the bateau plan. “They are practical for some purposes still.”
