OUTDOORS: Human use helped shape the James

Maybe it's because my parents' house was filled with old books, but I could never get enough of the worlds contained in used-book stores. Rummaging through the stacks for the title that inexplicably catches your eye, sitting down on the floor to page through it, putting it back and choosing another. I've spent hours upon hours like this since I was a kid.

Like being outdoors, it's an experience that engages all the senses (save maybe taste) — a delicious paradox. It doesn't happen on every trip, but the exhilaration of finding an unknown book by a forgotten author is what keeps me coming back.

Is there an Internet-age equivalent? Will these experiences still be available when all of the world's book are scanned into bits and bytes? Will anyone seek them out? Will they know what they're missing?

I don't know for sure, but a recent experience tells me that, while the method of exploration may be different, the thrill of following leads down the rabbit hole to an overlooked gem gathering dust somewhere will never wane.

The circumstances of the search elude me, but a few months back, clicking around the web, I came across a reference to an old mill on the north bank of the James not far from the current Nickel Bridge site. The author credited another author — a set of authors, actually — and a book I'd never heard of with the information.

I did some Googling and found precious little. What I did find, though, brought that familiar used bookstore feeling flooding back. The book was the "Falls of the James Atlas" by W.E. Trout III, James Moore III and George D. Rawls. I knew I had to have it.

Problem: The only place I could find it was on the website of the Fluvanna County Historical Society. I called numerous times, but this was around the holidays and no one answered. I figured I'd have to drive out there.

Then one day two weeks ago, I received a call. Yes, they had the book and, yes, they'd send me one. I admit this is pure geekery, but I was fired up. The book arrived soon thereafter, and it's as engrossing and illuminating as I'd hoped. Maybe more so.

The front features an 1871 painting by Harry Fenn of the James with downtown Richmond in the background. "Since its inception, the James has been an oasis in the midst of commerce and industry," the caption reads. That gives a clue as to the authors' intentions.

Prepared for the Virginia Canals & Navigation Society, this slim tome is one of a series, covering much of the length of the river. To call their work meticulous would be to grossly understate the effort and painstaking research that went into this book.

From Tuckahoe Creek and Bosher's Dam to the beginning of the tidal James, the river is divided into 10 sections. Each section features a hand-drawn map with dozens of places of interest marked. On the facing page, those places are explained and put into context.

Here's an example: The piece I saw online that first mentioned this atlas referred to "Foushee-Ritchie Mill," just east of the Nickel Bridge on the James' north bank, not far from the bear enclosure at Maymont. I went down to check it out. Sure enough, the remains of an old mill are hidden among the sycamores and birches there.

According to the atlas, the mill was built in 1819 by Dr. William Foushee and sold to Thomas Ritchie in 1824. The book also mentions a mill dam across half the James in that area (the rapids there now are known as Mitchell's Gut), which shunted water to the mill "by damming spaces between the bedrocks with piled blasted stones."

Reading entries such as that, all of a sudden the way I see the river has changed. We tend to think of places like rivers and forests as always being exactly as they are. In the 1920s, what is now Pocahontas State Park was used up farmland where few crops grew. Now it's a towering forest. The James through Richmond, likewise, has a dynamic history of human use that has shaped it, at least in the past 300 years, as much as Mother Nature.

The "Falls of the James Atlas" is like a guidebook to a place more foreign than we realize. Without it, I realized, I was missing hundreds of years of context when I fished under the Powhite Parkway Bridge or paddled Huguenot Flatwater or looked down on Belle Isle from the trails above.

Who knew there were so many quarries on the south side of the river near 42nd Street? Where did Native Americans place rock fish traps in the river, and how did they work? How and why was Bosher's Dam built? What are the meanings of the markings on the stone piers of the 1891 Belt Line Bridge? What's a sluice and why are there so many in the river?

The atlas is full of minutia. For the James lovers out there, every bit will seem magical. Every bit will deepen their understanding of the relationship past Richmonders had with the river, oftentimes explaining why it looks and acts the way it does today.