Haw River

About

Haw River, North Carolina — 1740s Saxapahaw, Catawba Indians. The Sissipahaw — sometimes rendered 'Saxapahaw' — were a Siouan-speaking tribe who lived along the Haw in what is now Alamance and Chatham counties, settling the banks and tributary creeks and drawing on the valley's abundant natural resources. Decimated by European disease and warfare across the 17th and 18th centuries, their descendants today are associated with the Saponi and other Piedmont Siouan peoples. The name endures in Saxapahaw, the mill village that still anchors the corridor between the Upper and Middle Haw.

European settlement took shape in the 1740s, when Saxapahaw — its name a Catawba word for 'pine tree' — became the first European-American settlement on the river. From 1744 to 1760 a Catawba Indian trading post there served as the principal colonial trading center, a frontier hub in the decades before the Piedmont filled with farms and mills.

The 19th and early 20th centuries reshaped the watershed. Loggers worked the Haw's forests from the 1830s through the 1920s, floating timber on logging drives and feeding local sawmills until the old-growth stands were exhausted around 1910; state forestry conservation began in 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale cutting. Rail arrived early: the 1841 construction of the North Carolina Railroad — the first state-owned railroad in the United States — crossed the Haw at Haw River Station, the settlement that still carries the river's name as a town.

The Haw's flow has been studied for well over a century. USGS survey work in the 1870s–1890s and the establishment of gauging stations from the 1880s into the 1910s produced the first comprehensive hydrological picture of the river, and state geological streamflow assessments followed in the 1910s–1930s. Today USGS gauge 02096500 records a discharge that averages roughly 780 cubic feet per second. That water matters far beyond the paddling line — the Haw is the principal water source for Greensboro, Burlington, and Chapel Hill. The river's modern chapter turned in 1982, when the B. Everett Jordan Reservoir, better known as Jordan Lake, was completed, flooding the New Hope bottomlands across Chatham and Durham counties. Later state water-pollution studies, Clean Water Act assessments, and TMDL programs took up the accumulated legacy of a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts.

The river's contemporary identity is a conservation story. The Haw River Assembly, founded in 1982, spent decades building a constituency for the river, and in 2006 a major community effort founded the Haw River Trail, pairing a 40-mile paddle route with 19 miles of hiking trail. In 2015 the Haw River Paddle Trail became the first certified NC State Water Trail, and the 2018–2024 Haw River State Trail Master Plan expanded the corridor to 80 miles. The Haw also carries state recognition as Haw River State Park land and a candidate for North Carolina Scenic River designation. Paddlers run it in three broad reaches — the Upper Haw from Altamahaw to Saxapahaw, a Class I rural float; the Middle Haw from Saxapahaw to Bynum, Class I–II intermediate whitewater; and the Lower Haw from Bynum to Jordan Lake, Class I–II past forested bluffs. Optimal flows run 300 to 1,500 cfs on gauge 02096500, and outfitters like the Haw River Canoe and Kayak Company run rentals and shuttles out of Saxapahaw.