Roanoke Canal Museum, North Carolina

This museum is located at a now high and dry lock on the former Roanoke Canal, a nine-mile long navigation canal built between 1819 and 1823 to bypass the Great Falls and Roanoke Rapids. It was part of a network of canals and locks along the Roanoke River intended to provide access for goods to travel from the tidewaters of Norfolk to the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, 400 miles inland. This portion of the system operated for a few decades, until it and many other navigations canals were made obsolete by railroads. In the late 1800s, part of the old canal was converted into a power canal for local industries, including an early kraft pulp and paper mill, which opened in 1909, and developed into a large paper plant on the river which is still active. By the 1950s, these canals were abandoned and the Roanoke Rapids Dam was constructed upstream, which transformed the downstream flow through the region.