Jackson River

About

Jackson River, Virginia — 1964 Gathright Dam Lake Moomaw 2,530 ac, 1750 Land Grant, Alleghany Highlands, Borden. The Jackson River gauge, USGS station 02012500, averages about 480 cubic feet per second, with paddling flows running best between 200 and 1,000 cfs. Rated Class I–II through most of its length, the river offers a mountain-valley float rather than whitewater. Below Gathright Dam it runs as a trophy trout tailwater; from Falling Spring to Clifton Forge it winds through a Class I–II mountain valley; and the lower Jackson broadens to Class I across a wide valley on its way to the James.

Long before dams and gauging stations, the Jackson River valley in the Allegheny Highlands was a borderland between Monacan and Shawnee territory. The remote mountain valley served as hunting ground and as a natural corridor through the Alleghenies, and the hot springs of Bath County drew Native peoples for thousands of years. The river takes its name from William Jackson, an early settler granted land here in 1750, a grant that defined the colonial chapter of the valley.

The industrial era arrived with timber. From the 1830s through the 1920s the Jackson River watershed was logged to feed the regional timber industry and the railroad expansion that followed. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators 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 logging. Around the same period, early hydrological work took shape: USGS survey and gauging efforts dating to the 1870s and 1880s gave the Jackson its first comprehensive streamflow assessments, later joined by Clean Water Act evaluations between 1972 and 2000 and, more recently, TMDL restoration programs.

The river's defining chapter came in 1964. The Corps of Engineers completed Gathright Dam, located 43 miles above the confluence of the Jackson and James Rivers and 19 miles north of Covington, creating Lake Moomaw at 2,530 acres. Benjamin C. Moomaw Jr. (1889–1978), for whom the lake is named, is remembered as the "Father of the Gathright Dam." The project stands as both flood-control infrastructure and the engine of the modern fishery: cold, oxygen-rich water from the dam's deep release sustains trophy brown trout, protected by special-regulation sections. From the 1980s through the 2010s, Jackson River restoration has been a continuing theme.

Today the Jackson is one of western Virginia's most prized angling destinations. Above Lake Moomaw it fishes as an excellent smallmouth bass, rock bass, and stocked rainbow and brown trout fishery, earning its billing as a Virginia Blue-Ribbon Trout Stream within the George Washington National Forest. It is also a popular canoeing and kayaking destination, and it underpins the economies of Covington, Hot Springs, and Warm Springs. Guided float fishing and paddling are offered by outfitters such as Highland Adventures. The Jackson endures as a working piece of flood-control infrastructure and a living recreational corridor, drawing fishermen who measure its worth one cast at a time.