RADFORD'S RIVER
Our town was built on a series of shelves paralleling the river called the “New” which was carved out of ancient Appalachian rock over the centuries during which the Ice Age cap was receding northward. That portion of the town on the right hand as we faced the wide river, was called “East End”and that on our left, logically, designated as “West End”.We lived in the middle portion which was designated as “Central” Radford. Collectively, since we were joined together, the threesome came to be called the City of Radford in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
It was a city. It sneaked in just under the legal wires in the early part of the century before the population of official cities was doubled to ten thousand inhabitants. We never had more than six-thousand-some in the years when I was growing up there.
It was built on this series of shelves of varied widths as they came up or were worn down beside the river. The far side of the river remained fairly stable and did not give way to the rushing waters as readily. Its stubbornness only caused the river to dig in deeper on its determined way to the Kanawha, the Ohio, the giant Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. In flood times the river came up on the shelves it had already carved and washed new areas each time.
It is deemed to be the oldest river on the North American continent. Check any map of the continent. You will see that all of the northward flowing rivers end up in the Arctic Ocean and they remained under a mass of ice long after the one forming on the spine of the Appalachian Mountains was flowing freely.
How and why then, is it called “New” River?
It has not,of course, always bee known by that name. Early visitors it simply called "the river" or the “great river” since it was , and is, the most impressive stream of water in that entire sector. There was one explorer-traveler named Abraham Wood who named most things he found as if they were personal property. He christened it “Woods River”. It appears as such on many early maps. I don't know if he also named other rivers in his egocentric manner, but he did name gaps in the mountains by the same name and we have two “Wood's Gaps” in Virginia's mountains to this day. Just who renamed Wood's River the “New” is not clear unless it could have been early settlers seeing it for their first time after the James River on their trek from the north and east There is a possibility, too, that people upstream in North Carolina called it the New river at one time and the name “sorta drifted” downstream with the currents. I have never come across any mention of that, but it seems logical to me that the name might well have been given at the upper end.
An y way, Radford's River is called the “New” and it can be just that for visitors. The river is unpredictable in many ways and stories concerning it's hastening quest to find the far off sea are plentiful.
A.L.M. February 22, 2003 [c560wds]
