Few parcels of earth have seen as much conflict, as much drama, as Jamesland. This has always been a place of collision, of shattered rock and spilled blood, of fertilization and conquest and exchange. It would be difficult to find any motif in the saga of our planet that has not at some point found expression within these hundred miles square.
In its very bones, underneath quiet Piedmont towns like Dillwyn and Cartersville and Amelia, rests the wreckage of ancient lands that were once launched across oceans to pile up here. Twice at least it has found itself at the heart of a supercontinent, buried under colossal mountains thrust up along its spine. As a province of Pangea it was once stationed at the world’s very center, near the crossing of the equator and prime meridian; fossils from that era reveal it as a hub of a grand evolutionary laboratory, spinning up strange prototypes of the mammals and reptiles that would later inherit the Earth.
In Jamesland’s later life it has enjoyed a long tectonic peace, only to be shaken repeatedly by the clash of human cultures. Many of us grew up with a version of this tale, exemplified by the Pocahontas story, that casts it in a heroic light: destiny smiles on brave adventurers, while noble savages retire from the stage. Origin myths often serve to tidy and erase. The James is often called “America’s founding river,” because it was on its shores that the first lasting English colony was planted. But this triumphant slogan obscures the trauma of that process and those who disproportionately bore it: the Indigenous and African women, men, and children who were torn from their homelands, thrown into chains, felled by alien plagues, and forced into a centuries-long struggle for their basic rights. Their bloodshed and heartbreak was baked into the crucible that birthed the United States.
Our waterway and its tributaries witnessed the first gathering of elected representatives in the New World, in the summer of 1619; they also witnessed the arrival of the first African slaves in the future United States, a few weeks later. Over the centuries that followed they witnessed the climactic stage of a revolution, and the conclusion of a civil war. Again and again great powers have chosen this battered land as the backdrop for their battles, their pronouncements, their plot twists. What we know of these from the historical record only scratches the surface of its true history, with a lost Indigenous narrative spanning eighteen millennia or more, and hundreds of millions of years of geological and evolutionary theater before that.
The flow of water between the James’ headsprings and its mouth 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. Those who answered that call began the process, for better or for worse, of building the most powerful nation ever seen.
Thus the story of the world cannot be told without the compelling chapters, both dark and bright, that have been written here in Jamesland. What its future impact will be is not yet written. One claim, however, is safe to make: that impact will far exceed the size of a modest scrap of earth between the Alleghenies and the Chesapeake.