The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:
Navigable water — salty, fresh and brackish — played an outsized role in Virginia’s Colonial history well after Algonquin-speaking natives made this their homeland.
Water brought the English settlers to the Virginia shores. Navigable rivers provided transportation and trade. And irrigated soil developed agriculture to feed new settlers and power exports.
Water made today’s Hampton Roads — seven low-lying cities hugging the Atlantic Ocean, Chesapeake Bay and the James and Elizabeth rivers — a center of international shipping.
British rulers and Colonialists recognized the strategic value of Virginia’s water — and the bridges and causeways that made water passable.
“The concept of connecting the watersheds was a dream for those living in Tidewater and the Carolina sounds at the time,” says Jon Stull, a volunteer docent at the Great Bridge Battlefield & Waterways History Foundation’s museum in Chesapeake, which devotes part of its space to curating the role water played in the battle and in Virginia’s development. “Even from early on, that drive was there.”
By the 1700s, a museum exhibit explains, the Great Road from North Carolina into Norfolk served as a critical path for trade and travel. The Great Bridge was a strategic location, linking the Great Road with the Elizabeth River and the Northwest River and providing land access to Norfolk and the Chesapeake Bay.
It’s no wonder, then, that British and Patriot troops fought over this narrow strip of land on Dec. 9, 1775, during the Battle of Great Bridge, the first significant Revolutionary battle fought in Virginia.
See our accompanying story on the Battle of Great Bridge.
At that time, the area south of the bridge was the heartbeat of local commerce. Warehouses and wharves filled with hogs, cattle, shingles, tar and turpentine. Tobacco flowed from Currituck County, N.C., to Great Bridge for shipment to Norfolk and beyond.
When Lord Dunmore left Chesapeake Bay, the Colonials inherited a massive waterway. His departure opened a liquid highway that transported hundreds of men, and tons of munitions, food and supplies in amounts that could not have been transported by wagon.
A&C Canal
The Great Bridge Battlefield & Waterways Historic Park in Chesapeake sits yards from the site of the battle along the Elizabeth River, but hugs a parallel waterway flowing from the Elizabeth that did not exist in 1775 — the Albemarle & Chesapeake (A&C) Canal.
“Deriving its name for the two great bodies of water that it connects, the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia and the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina, this man-made canal was an engineering feat when it was completed in 1859,” writes Lillie Gilbert in an article on the museum’s website about the history of the canal system.
Today, the canal is part of the famed Intracoastal Waterway, a 3,000-mile system running along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Massachusetts to Texas. (Fun fact: the Intracoastal’s Mile Zero is in the Elizabeth River off the shores of Portsmouth and Norfolk.)
The waterway hosts leisurely sailing boats and cabin cruisers as well as hard-working barges and commercial ships. They pass right by the museum at Great Bridge Battlefield, their operators and passengers perhaps oblivious to the role of water in a pivotal Revolutionary War victory.
Work began on the canal after delays caused by work on the nearby Dismal Swamp Canal (1793), the War of 1812 and lack of funds. By 1854, numerous congressional acts had been passed enabling construction, and in 1855, actual work finally began.
The Dismal Swamp Canal, which connects the Elizabeth River with the Pasquotank River and Albemarle Sound in a roughly north-south direction, was dug largely with slave labor. The A&C, flowing more east-west, was dug with nine steam dredges operating on floating platforms. Completed in just four years, the canal created by steam-driven technology was an engineering marvel.
“It’s very close to what the Colonials had identified for their desired run for canals,” Stull says. “They had that vision in Williamsburg in the early days.”
It is near this battle site that, in 1859, the single lock of the A&C Canal with reversible gate heads was built to enable ships to lock up or down depending on the water level. This lock was 200 feet long and 40 feet wide, at the time the largest on the Atlantic Coast.
These waterways, envisioned hundreds of years ago to connect the 10 miles between Chesapeake Bay and the Carolina sounds, continue to serve more than transportation or recreation. The system plays a pivotal role in separating the brackish water of Chesapeake Bay from fresher water in North Carolina, guarding — at least for now — against Mother Nature’s relentless march.
