The Appomattoc were an Algonquian-speaking people of the Powhatan Confederacy whose villages stood along the lower river when John Smith mapped the Chesapeake. Their werowance Coquonasum had governed a population numbering in the hundreds; their towns appeared on the earliest English maps as Apamatuck, Apamutiky, Appamattuck, and a dozen other transliterations. By the late 17th century, war, disease, and forced displacement had broken the Appomattoc as an independent polity. Their name stayed on the water. The story of the river is, in part, the story of a people whose presence is preserved only in the syllables English speakers continue to mispronounce.

From 1745 to 1891, the Upper Appomattox Canal Navigation System made the river commercial. Workers cleared snags, built locks, and dug a parallel canal so flat-bottomed batteaux could move tobacco hogsheads and other cargo from Farmville down to Petersburg's fall line. Eppington Plantation, owned by the family of Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law, had docks where boats carrying seven tons could make a four-day round trip to Petersburg. Below the fall line, larger ships took on 200-ton loads. At City Point, oceangoing vessels could dock. For 145 years the river was an artery of Virginia's plantation economy - which is to say, an artery moved largely by enslaved labor at every link in the chain.

When Robert E. Lee's army fled west from Petersburg, the Appomattox River became the geography of escape. The 2,400-foot High Bridge, a Southside Railroad span 125 feet above the river east of Farmville, was the critical crossing. On April 6, 1865, Confederate engineers tried to burn the bridge to slow the pursuit. Union troops put out the fires before the structure collapsed and captured the crossing. The loss meant the Federal infantry could pursue Lee on a parallel course, no longer separated by an uncrossable river. Three days later, at the village of Appomattox Court House just a few miles from the river's headwaters, Lee surrendered. The river that had carried Virginia's economy carried, in its last military chapter, the army that had been the Confederacy's pride.

Today the river is part working waterway, part recreation corridor. Lake Chesdin, formed by a dam between Petersburg and Farmville, supplies drinking water to the Tri-Cities. Below the small Abutment Dam, in the village of Matoaca, paddlers slip kayaks into the current for the run down to Petersburg near Virginia State University. The lower river offers Class I and II rapids, herons, river otters, and the occasional bald eagle. The Appomattox-Buckingham State Forest, near the river's middle reaches, preserves nearly 20,000 acres of working pine and hardwood. Whatever the river was - colonial highway, plantation artery, military barrier - it is now also a place where families spend a weekend in the woods.

The river makes a great arc across central Virginia. From its Piedmont source it flows southeast through the Appomattox-Buckingham State Forest to Farmville, the college town anchored by Longwood University. It loops northeast and then southeast across the coastal plain, passing south of Richmond and east through Petersburg, the city it once supplied. Petersburg is its head of navigation - the point above which ocean vessels cannot reach - because of the fall line that drops the river off the Piedmont onto the coastal plain. From Petersburg it widens into a tidal estuary and finally joins the James at City Point in Hopewell. End to end: 157 miles of Virginia history, with one Algonquian name holding it all together.