Qualla: Appomattox River

Appomattox River: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Appomattox River starts in a field. There is no springhouse, no dramatic gorge, no famous waterfall at its source - only a damp seam in the Piedmont clay near State Route 656, three miles northeast of the town of Appomattox, where the water just appears. From this unceremonious beginning the river runs 157 miles east through forest and farmland, past the village where Lee surrendered, through Farmville and Petersburg, before joining the James at City Point. The English colonists tried to rename it the Bristoll River. The renaming did not stick. The Appomattoc name did - a small linguistic victory for a people whose land the English mostly took.

Read more: Appomattox River on Qualla

Appomattox River: Whose River It Was

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Eng...

Read more: Appomattox River on Qualla

Appomattox River: The Working River

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Appomattox River on Qualla

Appomattox River: April 1865, the High Bridge

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Appomattox River on Qualla

Appomattox River: Lake Chesdin and the Modern River

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ru...

Read more: Appomattox River on Qualla

Appomattox River: From Headwater to Mouth

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Read more: Appomattox River on Qualla