Dutch Gap
| Decided to head off on a dark day to Dutch Gap, and take some pics of that since I'd never been there. Dutch Gap is only yards away from Henricus City, the second English city established in the New World, and the place where Pocahontas first lived after she was kidnapped by the English. Managed to talk Kim into going, just to get out and around, although she talked on her phone the entire time. :) | |
| | You can see Dutch Gap above. To the left and right are the James River, sweeping back on itself in wide curves, and in 1864 straight in front of you would have been land still, but General Butler set his men to digging that short channel you see in front to join the two channels, to bypass Confederate batteries like Battery Dantzler. He had difficulty doing it, and the project was not finished until after the war, and it has been greatly widened since for modern shipping, as it cuts several miles off the journey inland to Port Richmond. | 
| | This is an archeological dig on Rock Hall, the first English dwelling of Pocahontas, only a hundred yards or so from the south side of the Dutch Gap channel. The objects you see are not stone blocks, but Styrofoam molds with some kind of hardened substance in them, as if they were taking a casting of the foundations of the site. | |
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| And as a bonus I stopped and photographed Fort Wead, a Union fort in the Bermuda Hundred area that never saw action, but was built as a fallback position in case the Confederates broke through the Union lines.
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