Canal Reminiscences

Before railroads swept America clean of romance, there was the canal: a slow, water-born world where the rhythm of mule steps and the creak of lock gates measured time differently. George William Bagby writes back to that world from its last days, collecting his memories of travel on the James River and Kanawha Canal in the years before the railway rendered it obsolete. His is not a historian's account but a sentimental journey through a landscape and a way of life already fading by the time he put pen to paper. He recalls the boatmen, the lock-tenders, the communities along the route, the particular quality of light on Virginia waterways at dawn. There is humor here, and longing, and the quiet grief of a man watching the world he loved give way to progress.