Dutch Gap, Virginia

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 north of the lost 17th-century town of Henricus.Henricus Historical Park is devoted to that town.

The name "Dutch Gap" may have a connection to the 1611 Cittie of Henricus. According to an unsubstantiated story, Sir Thomas Dale cut a ditch across the 500 yard wide neck of land behind the new fort, connecting the two parts of the James River. It became known as "Dale's Dutch Gap". This would have protected the rear of the fort from possible attack and shortened the distance upriver. It must be noted that no historical evidence or documentation supports this story, and the connection may come merely from the fact that Dale served the Dutch Republic prior to his employment with the Virginia Company of London, and did create a defensive ditch on the aforementioned neck of land, though the cut was by no means a navigable canal as imagined. This length of the James River had broad, meandering stretches and hairpin turns 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.

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