Epoxy

Rappahannock River

Tidewater, Virginia, USA

Also known as The Rapp, Northern Neck, Middle Peninsula

The Rappahannock ran behind a dam at Fredericksburg for most of a century. In February 2004 army engineers blew a hole in it.

Embrey Dam went up in 1910, 22 feet of concrete across the river, and a timber and stone dam had stood near the same spot since 1853. Shad, herring and striped bass coming up from the Chesapeake stopped there for about forty generations.

It had stopped earning its keep long before it came down. The city's water came from elsewhere and the power station was gone. A local group spent close to twenty years lobbying to have it removed, and the money arrived after a senator spent a day fishing with them.

A detachment from Fort Eustis set the charges. The blast opened around a hundred miles of river above the city, and the Rappahannock is now reckoned the longest free flowing river on the east coast.

Details

Feature: Coastline
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Cherry
Colour: Ocean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: February 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

Detail of the Rappahannock River map by Keyway

How this one was made

Cherry, blue and black on the same board, which makes the prep the whole game. Each colour section gets dammed and then flooded, so pigment sits on every square inch of a sealed board rather than only in the engraving, and with the recesses just a sixteenth to an eighth deep there is no sanding a stain back out. The water is the finest detail we have poured: the Rappahannock's creeks branch down to hair width and run a long way inland, and channels that narrow give trapped air nowhere to vent under a flood. Along the right hand side the open water runs straight up against the dashed border, so blue and black sit adjacent for most of that edge with only the dam between them. The compass is unengraved wood standing inside the water, so it went under the blue with everything else and came back at the sanding stage.