There is a spot at the top of Jamesland, four thousand feet above the sea, where you can stand with a glass of water and wield an extraordinary power.
This is not quite the watershed’s high point; that’s a few miles south and a couple hundred feet higher, on Little Ridge. Nor is it the official source of the James, defined by the greatest distance in river miles between headspring and mouth; that’s a few miles east, on Lantz Mountain. But this spot is, I submit, the best starting point for an epic journey through our nation’s bloodstream.
The summit nearest here, one of many protuberances along the gnarled spine of Allegheny Mountain, bears the fitting name of Watering Pond Knob. That name’s history is long lost, but a few hundred yards upslope to your west is indeed an ephemeral pool formed in a natural sag of the rock: a tiny sapphire stud in the lush forest fabric, the sort of place where salamanders ritually gather in the early spring. It is here on the knob’s shoulder, though, a short walk out into an old cropfield, that we can position ourselves on the tipping point of a continent.
In fact this spot is not merely a tipping point but a triple point, one of the rarest of topographical quirks. Face south and pour out a drop of water, and your drop—if all goes well—will make its way slowly, via Back Creek and Jackson River, to the James and the Chesapeake beyond. Now face north and pour, and your second drop will dribble off toward Laurel Fork and the Potomac, not joining the first until they drift into the open Atlantic. Finally, pour to the west and your water will embark on the longest journey of all: into Griffin Run and Deer Creek, thence to the Greenbrier, New, Kanawha, and Ohio Rivers, and finally into the mighty Mississippi and south to the Gulf of Mexico.
The former divide, between James and Potomac, may seem relatively trivial today. But for four years in the 1860s these two water drops would have drained into each other’s enemy territory, ultimately floating past the capitals of two warring nations. It’s no accident that the boundary between Virginia and West Virginia runs along Allegheny Mountain. From Watering Pond Knob, look to the northwest across the valley of North Fork Deer Creek and you’ll see the site of Camp Allegheny, the highest military encampment in the Civil War’s entire eastern theater. It was here, in a picturesque maple orchard, that Colonel Edward Johnson’s rebel troops dug their heels in to guard the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike against the advancing Union army from the west. They met in a frigid wind at dawn on December 13, 1861, with Brigadier General Milroy’s force unable to dislodge the Confederates. As a reward for their success the rebels got three more months of measles and frostbite in conditions “harsh as the North Pole”; orders to withdraw had arrived just before the battle, but were now revoked in favor of holding the line. A year and a half later that line would be formalized as the border of a brand-new state of the Union.
The flow of water between here and the sea has carved out not only physical valleys but also the defining axes of America. Stereotypes of “southerners” as poor, backwards, and defiant, and of the “north” as harboring a grasping, bureaucratic elite, date back all the way to the seventeenth century with the James as the divide. It was westward up the James, meanwhile, that the colonists first aimed their dreams. The instructions they carried with them from the Virginia Company of London had made sure of that, directing them to pursue the source of their chosen waterway in hopes of finding “Some Spring which run the Contrary way toward the East India Sea.” Between the promise of a Northwest Passage and the swirling rumors of gold and jewels in the Virginian backcountry, this river bore with it from across the horizon the earliest tidings of manifest destiny.
But our drop of south- and east-bound water knows nothing of all that. It knows only the immediate pull of gravity, beckoning it into the hollow below to join with the millions of other drops in Back Creek. Once there, it is safely off on an inexorable journey that in two weeks or so will deliver it to downtown Richmond—in theory.
In practice, predicting the journey of a molecule of water has always been fantastically complicated, and has become much more so in a watershed transformed by human engineering. To begin with, the odds of our molecule entering a stream at all—let alone doing so in an orderly, timely manner—are not high. It stands a better chance of evaporating first (especially on a summer day like today) or being sucked up by a root, shunted through a plant’s plumbing, and breathed out by a leaf (especially in this kind of natural setting). If it avoids these fates and instead soaks deep into the soil and rock, it may face a detour of years or even centuries through the great aquifers in our collective basement.
But let’s say for the sake of expediency that our drop manages to trickle across the earth, join with others in a rivulet, and run babbling to the mountain’s foot. From there the next twenty miles of its trip will be smooth and scenic sailing, southward down the arrow-straight limestone valley of Back Creek. (Why arrow-straight? The Valley and Ridge region is a vast upturned layer cake, shoved on its side during the pileup of continents three hundred million years ago, with a stack of Paleozoic seabeds comprising its layers. The softer limestone layers, made of the shells and skeletons of creatures that teemed in turquoise waters, have been eaten away into valleys over the ages; each harder sandstone layer, formed where ancient rivers dumped the debris of crumbling mountains, now juts out as a ridge.) This particular valley looks much as it has for thousands of years, excepting the cows that dot the thin strips of pasture along the meandering streambanks. Soon after the creek crosses the invisible Bath County line, however, it will run into its first major obstacle—and its first sign that the laws of physics are no longer its only masters.
Suddenly here the sycamores overhead thin out, the sun beats down unchecked, and our drop finds itself drifting to a standstill in a placid body of water that covers the entire valley floor for two miles ahead. This is the lower reservoir of the Bath County Pumped Storage facility, one of the most ambitious of all the human experiments with Jamesland’s water. Once dubbed “the world’s biggest battery,” it was planned in the seventies as a way to store energy during times of low demand on the power grid and release it when demand is high. Thus what happens next to our water drop depends on when it arrives in the lake. If it is after dark, it may find itself sucked into the black thirty-foot mouth of an underwater tunnel, swept along for more than a half-mile through the heart of a mountain, and deposited in yet another lake, twelve hundred feet higher—undoing half of its downhill progress. There it will sit until it is pressed into service, perhaps as soon as late the following morning when air conditioners across the eastern seaboard begin to strain. Back down the pipe it will go, doing its minuscule part to help spin the massive turbines that now serve as generators instead of pumps. Only then—if it is lucky—can it break the cycle and escape through the lower lake’s 135-foot dam.
After this harrowing detour comes another stretch of peace, as Back Creek continues down its pasture-lined valley before taking a hard left turn into a sinuous gorge. The muggy summer heat is briefly relieved by a 58-degree breeze emerging from a hole in the foot of Back Creek Mountain, lending the name “Blowing Springs” to the campground here. The spring offers our first clue to another, unseen dimension of Jamesland’s circulatory system, hidden beneath its skin. We will learn much more of this later. For now we enjoy the ride as our drop dashes over small whitewater ledges, eddies into blue pools, and floats under the branches of elms and past banks of wildflowers that thrive on the rich floodplain soil.
No sooner has our drop navigated a twisting route through the gorge than it finds itself running headlong into another stream, the Jackson River, which has been paralleling it all along on the far side of Back Creek Mountain. And no sooner have these two waterways mingled than they find themselves stalling out once again, this time at the head of the two-thousand-acre Lake Moomaw. Named for an Alleghany County businessman known to all as “Mr. Ben,” this reservoir represents to boaters and fishermen a limpid, mountain-rimmed Eden, and to some environmentalists an infamous, destructive boondoggle.
The project was first authorized in 1946 only to grind to a halt in the face of widespread skepticism. The stated rationale was a combination of flood control and recreation, but it was far from clear that these benefits outweighed the costs—including the costs of obliterating the small town of Greenwood, and inundating one of Virginia’s most scenic and pristine remaining stretches of river along what was then known as Kincaid Gorge. Opponents suspected that the real incentive for the lake was being swept under the rug: the need to ensure a steady supply of water for the business that dominated Alleghany County, the giant paper mill a few miles downstream at Covington. Such an arrangement, it seemed, would allow the mill to continue dumping its customary load of pollutants into the Jackson without overhauling its facility to meet federal standards.
The squabble stretched on for nearly thirty years. Groups of concerned citizens assembled; studies by the Corps of Engineers piled up; projected costs quadrupled; the EPA filed suit. But despite the involvement of the government and the public, in hindsight it’s hard to avoid the take that the outcome came down to the flexing of muscles by a few local strongmen. Few were stronger than “Uncle Tom” Gathright, who owned much of the land in question and ran it as a hunting and fishing club for his friends (a group that included radio stars, congressmen, and a former vice-president). Gathright’s quest to bring big industry to Alleghany County was relentless, and one of the proudest feathers in his cap was the rayon plant he’d landed for Covington in 1928. The plant would use as its raw material wood pulp from the paper mill across town, which in turn would continue to devour the seemingly endless supply of red spruce timber in the Alleghenies. It was a well-oiled and dazzling machine that sent the community into raptures of economic optimism. Nothing better epitomized this than the speech given by flamboyant booster “Colonel Dick” Stokes, upon welcoming home the triumphant Gathright in ‘28: “We are not going to stop until our valleys are filled with factories and mansions crown every hill…we are not going to stop until we are all garbed in silks and satins!”
Ground was finally broken on Gathright Dam in 1974, and Lake Moomaw was filled by 1982. By this time the vision of Alleghany County bedecked in silks was comically quaint, while doubts about the reservoir’s integrity—both physical and moral—would only continue to fester. The Swiss-cheese walls of leaky limestone that supported it led one engineer to characterize it as a “dam-builder’s nightmare,” and the Corps of Engineers in 2009 assigned the dam a safety rating of “Urgent (Unsafe or Potentially Unsafe).” No doubt the use of this land and its water will continue to be fraught into the foreseeable future.
For now, though, our water drop’s time here is a placid interlude, disturbed only by the wake from an occasional speedboat. It may last a month, or a year, or even longer. But if our drop keeps its head down and avoids evaporation, it will eventually make its way into one of the nine portals in the reservoir’s intake tower, to be piped through the dam and back into the Jackson River. Here it will feel the rush of liberation, but also an unexpected chill. As a carrot thrown into the Moomaw plan, the Corps proposed to drain lake water selectively from the colder depths, creating sixty-degree conditions in the lower Jackson that would be ideal for the stocking of trout. For nearly a decade in the early days, each year saw the dumping here of fifty thousand fingerlings of brown trout from Europe and rainbow trout from the West Coast. Populations soon became self-sustaining, placing tremendous pressure on the Jackson’s native fish but successfully molding the river into an angler’s dream.
If, that is, the angler can get access. The issue of rights to this stretch of the Jackson has become as fraught as the lake upstream. The stretch has been considered technically “navigable,” which should qualify it as public property, although the grounds for this are a bit flimsy (resting in large part on historic accounts of floating logs down the river to the mill). But a group of landowners along its banks have called upon an unexpected source to justify their own claims to the river: the original land grants from Kings George II and George III, issued in the mid-eighteenth century. Their case was taken up in 1996 by the Virginia Supreme Court, which ruled that crown grants trump the later state laws. Since then, landowners have leveraged the ruling to sue anglers for trespassing (and win), fueling an ongoing dispute and heated passions in the broader community. The more problems in a river we solve, the more we create.
Our water drop at this point has already encountered long interruptions, wild diversions, and abrupt temperature swings that would have been unimaginable to its predecessors before the industrial age. Yet for all that, the trip has been a clean one. The drop has had little but lush highland forest for a backdrop, and little but fish poop and silt grains to rub shoulders with. That is about to change.
Depending on the prevailing winds, you may smell the town of Covington well before you see it. The woods begin to retreat, the country homes proliferate, and the Jackson winds its way around a subdivision; then, without warning, the southern horizon is overtaken by towering plumes of steam and smoke and the air by the rotten-egg stench of sulfur. It’s the smell of money, the locals will tell you. To emphasize the positive is a matter of survival; if Covington’s paper mill goes, they fear, the town will go down with it.
The mill was built in 1899, by the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company, at a time when the notion of exhausting our natural resources was still remote and theoretical. Digesting the spruce timber of the Alleghenies into a cornucopia of paper products proved lucrative for decades; when spruce ran low the mill shifted to yellow pine, learned to make kraft paper for grocery bags and flour sacks, and didn’t miss a beat. Since then it has passed through the hands of a series of conglomerates—Westvaco, MeadWestvaco, WestRock, Smurfit Westrock—and spread its pulpers, refiners, digesters, smokestacks and fly ash ponds across a mile and a half of the Jackson riverfront. Today it eats mostly hardwoods, cranking out a million tons of bleached paperboard a year (the most in North America) to meet our craving for milk cartons, takeout boxes, and cigarette packs.
A machine this large leaves its mark. Covington’s reputation as dirty and smelly stretches back a century, but in the 1980s the gag reflexes of the mill’s neighbors morphed into a new flavor of fear. That was when the news broke that paper mills were among the leading producers of a substance dubbed “the Darth Vader of chemicals.” Dioxin, which first achieved infamy during the Agent Orange scandal, is a colorless, odorless chemical that lingers in the environment for decades, builds up in the fatty tissues of animals, and sneakily binds to receptors in our cells that control gene expression. Anxiety about the stuff mounted during the seventies as it was linked to widespread birth defects among the Vietnamese and various illnesses in returning American soldiers; it reached a fever pitch following the Love Canal disaster, when neighbors of a dioxin-laced New York landfill began reporting a slew of problems from cancers to miscarriages to cleft palates. Early studies warned that it was “the most potent animal carcinogen ever tested,” and a national search was mustered to identify where the chemical was coming from.
Among the biggest unexpected culprits: paper mills. Specifically, mills specializing in bleached paper, which used chlorine in the bleaching process. For each ton of bleached pulp produced, these mills spat out some 25,000 gallons of wastewater; this effluent was spiked with hundreds of exotic chemicals, including one with chlorine atoms newly bound to hydrocarbons from the wood: dioxin. The EPA launched an investigation of a hundred such facilities across the country, and found that when it came to dioxin discharge, big old Westvaco Covington ranked fifth.
A fresh flurry of scientific studies and media reports followed (this was now the early 1990s), along with a damage-control scramble by Big Paper. The resulting public messaging emphasized that the cancer risks from dioxin exposure now seemed a bit less scary than originally believed. In the meantime, however, new risks were being uncovered. In a Florida river downstream from a paper mill, for example, biologists stumbled upon a population of mosquitofish in which the females all looked and acted like males. Evidence mounted that dioxin can play havoc with our hormones, helping to explain the human birth defects documented earlier. No targeted study was ever done on the fish of the Jackson River, and the full story of the mill’s impact on the surrounding ecosystem (let alone its human community) will never be told. One carp from Covington waters, however, reeled in by an EPA researcher during those anxious days, offered a troubling testimony. The dioxin levels in its tissues exceeded the agency’s “potential human health concern” threshold by a factor of 400.
There are plenty more numbers and figures to reel off. They start to blur together after a while, but perhaps repeating them is a way of not forgetting. Over the stretch from 1990 to 1994, according to one investigation, the Covington mill released 22,000 pounds of human carcinogens into the water—the most of any Virginia polluter—to go along with more than 300,000 pounds of other toxic chemicals. No human health issues were ever conclusively linked to any of this, but of course the burden of proof is daunting. In any case, by ‘95 Westvaco had fast-tracked a $140 million project to eliminate chlorine from its bleaching process, and the dioxin scare gradually settled down.
The Jackson these days is indisputably cleaner, yet serious problems remain. A 2025 report pointed to the Covington paper mill as the top climate change offender among all such facilities nationwide, thanks to an eighty-year-old dinosaur of a boiler that belches an estimated 2.5 million tons of nitrous oxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year. At least a couple of times a year, rivergoers report discharges of noxious byproducts like “black liquor,” a skin-burning sludge of shredded wood fiber and lye. In November 2024, dozens of dead fish appeared in Covington after a plug came loose at the mill and caused the release of 36,000 gallons of untreated wastewater. So it goes. The impacts on the river will change, keeping pace with public pressure and technological advances, but they will never be zero.
Our drop of water may have no feelings on the matter, but for most of us following its journey, it surely comes as a relief to see Covington in the rearview. There will be far larger cities, and equally large industrial sites, to come. Yet it’s difficult not to see this last stretch as a point of no return: the waterway we are traveling is no longer, and will never again be, a natural river.
To be continued…