A major portion of the historic Woolen Mills dam will come down to make room for spawning shad, but some neighbors are not happy about it.
The Rivanna Conservation Society (RCS) is now accepting proposals for a “historical review of the Woolen Mills Dam” to gather data about the privately owned dam the RCS has sought to breach since around 2000.
RCS has been cooperating with the dam’s owners, and Albemarle County issued a demolition permit in March. The RCS plans to remove approximately 75 percent of the dam and keep the rest for “historical interpretation.” The Woolen Mills dam, built around 1830, was part of Charlottesville Woolen Mills, a textile factory which manufactured cloth for Confederate uniforms in the Civil War and remained a major economic driver through the turn of the century before closing in 1964.
Matt Rosefsky, RCS executive director, says the plan is to use “interpretive displays,” such as kiosks with photographs, to capture the dam’s history for the public.
The RCS plans to do away with most of the dam for ecological reasons—specifically the health of the American shad population. The dam breach would allow existing fish populations to return upriver to spawn.
”The driving force [for breaching the dam] is ecological, and it has other benefits as well,” says Rosefsky. “We’re going to be breaching it so that paddlers can canoe downstream and fish can swim upstream,” he says.
Though RCS documents show general neighborhood approval of the project, a few residents have voiced concerns.
Roger Voisinet, longtime resident and one of three riverfront homeowners in the Woolen Mills neighborhood, wrote a letter to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission in April 2006, asking that they stop the project. Among his concerns: decreasing water levels after the dam breach, destruction of the neighborhood’s historic character and a lack of independent studies on the ecological effects of the dam breach.
Proposals for the historical assessment will be accepted through June 16; RCS documents predict it should take about 30 days.
RCS has submitted a permit application to the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, Army Corps of Engineers, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, Virginia Department of Historic Resources, and the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.
If the permits come through as expected, Rosefsky foresees the dam breach taking place in late summer or early fall.—Meg McEvoy