Dutch Gap

Dutch Gap is located on the James River in Chesterfield County, Virginia; it was started as a canal by Union forces during the American Civil War to cut off a curl of the river controlled by Confederate forts. The canal was completed after the war and is now the main channel of the James River in this area. It is south of the lost 17th-century town of Henricus. The Henricus Historical Park is devoted to that town.

History

In 1611, Sir Thomas Dale, according to a method he had learned while campaigning in Holland, cut a ditch across a portion of land behind town connecting two parts of the James River. It became known as "Dale's Dutch Gap". It was a way to protect the rear of the town from possible attack and shorten the distance upriver. This length of the James River had broad, meandering stretches between Drewry's Bluff, where the river turns east into the coastal plain, and the confluence of the Appomattox River with the James below Bermuda Hundred.

During the American Civil War, Union troops started to construct a larger canal at Dutch Gap late in 1864. Among their workers were paid African-American laborers from the Freedmen's Colony of Roanoke Island. They had been freed by Union forces and were pressed into service away from their base off the mainland of North Carolina.