On a recent Saturday, I joined an exploratory hike of the Brown & Williamson Conservation Area with Chesterfield County naturalist, Mark Battista. Our group of about ten met up at Dutch Gap and headed south by van to the Bermuda Hundred section of Chesterfield County for this bushwhacking adventure.

In September 2001, the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation donated 262-acres along an approximately one-mile stretch of the James River to Chesterfield County. What a gift! And what’s more, the tobacco company donated the land to the County with use restrictions, so in 2003 the County in turn approved a conservation easement–held by Friends of Chesterfield’s Riverfront and the Virginia Outdoors Foundation–on the land, thus restricting its management as a premier conservation area.

The acquisition of this property and its future safeguards under conservation easement are in harmonious concert with the Chesterfield County Riverfront Plan adopted in 1997. This document provided a riverfront vision along both the James and the Appomattox Rivers, which encouraged and prioritized such gifts in order to protect valuable and sensitive environments, as well as provide public access to the rivers and surrounding wetlands. In fact the County just received its fourth Conservation Area donation, a 459-acre tract along lower Swift Creek from I-95 almost to the confluence with the Appomattox. The others are the Dutch Gap Conservation Area also along the James River and the Radcliffe Conservation Area along the Appomattox River.

As we traipsed along the shores of a small lake called Turkey Pond, up and down into deep troughs, across creek beds, up along a high bluff over the James River, we unveiled skunk cabbage–harbingers of spring–measured the size of old mountain laurels–much taller and thicker trunked than their mountain counterparts–and marveled at the array of pine varieties–short needled, long needled, loblolly. We stumbled over a collection of bones – “possibly pig’s,” said Mark, lamented the demise of a dried up vernal pool, watched an ironwood log sink under water and gazed up and down the main navigational channel of the James River–west towards the Mt. Blanco subdivision and east toward the giant eroded bluffs of Presquile National Wildlife Refuge.

In these woods, I could easily imagine myself a first Virginia, perhaps a Chickahominy or an early settler or more likely an old 21st century mom in a touring kayak paddling down the James River from Richmond stopping along the way at Chesterfield County River sites such as Dutch Gap Conservation Area, Brown & Williamson Conservation Area or Presquile National Wildlife Refuge, spending a couple of weeks paddling and camping on the tidewater portion of the newly created James River Canoe Trail….