Buchanan: End of the Line for the Great Canal

The town of Buchanan sits where the James River cuts through the Blue Ridge on its way east, and for decades that geography made it one of the most important places in Virginia.

The settlement was laid out in eighteen eleven and named for John Buchanan, an early soldier and landowner. The James River and Kanawha Canal, one of George Washington's great infrastructure dreams, reached here as its western terminus in eighteen fifty-one after spanning one hundred ninety-seven miles from Richmond with a long series of locks. Buchanan became a busy inland port, the gateway for goods moving between the coast and the mountain interior. Then the railroads made the canal obsolete, and Buchanan's moment passed. It was officially consolidated with the adjacent town of Pattonsburg in eighteen eighty-two. Today it is a quiet Botetourt County town. Pattonsburg, on the opposite bank, had been incorporated back in seventeen eighty-eight, and about twelve hundred people live in the merged town today. The old gauge dock where canal boats were measured is said to survive at the river's edge, a relic of a waterway that never quite made it to the Ohio. The canal was only about half finished when it reached Buchanan. When the Richmond and Allegheny Railroad later laid track along the old towpath, the line became part of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. The Buchanan Historic District is on the National Register of Historic Places.