Evaluación de plantas de tratamiento de aguas residuales:

In 1806, Robert Cowley had been employed as Doorkeeper for eleven years and free for twenty-one. I have imagined him standing just outside The Eagle Tavern at 12th and Main in the gray light of a chilly afternoon in early winter, 21 Dec. 1785. With the roar of 198

the James River just three blocks away competing, perhaps, with the roar of freedom in his head, and gazing through the steam of his first free breaths. He considered the town with the eyes of a free man, contemplating what Richmond would actually hold for him in the years ahead? The day, a few weeks later, when Cowley’s manumission was recorded with the city clerk, 21 January 1786, marked his first official day as a free man, and he, like all Richmonders, were part of a city in the making, already embarked on massive physical change and shimmering with the promises of the Revolution and the “Founding Fathers.”

A few years later Cowley took on the job of doorkeeper and keeper of the keys to the Capitol while it was still under construction. He moved into a house near the Capitol and from that moment Shockoe Hill was the top of his domain, and, except for the wooded nature of much of the neighborhood, might have had quite a view of Richmond--the little trading village that grew to a small town with tobacco warehouses at the falls of the James until 1780, when the American Revolution drove the decision to relocate the state capital there from Williamsburg. Benedict Arnold captured and burned the village in 1781 in his attempt to help the Loyalists wrest it from Patriot control, but he did not hold it for long.

198 _{“[Diary entry: 21 December 1785],” ​Founders Online​, National Archives,}

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-04-02-0002-0012-0021. [Original source: _​The

Diaries of George Washington_​, vol. 4, 1 September 1784 – 30 June 1786, ed. Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978, pp. 253–254.] “Wednesday 21st. Thermometer at 44 in the Morning—44 at Noon and 46 at Night. Lowering all day with but little Wind and that Easterly.”

The capital was built upon a landscape only recently recovered from one of the “great floods” which had “engulfed the lower portions of Richmond and Manchester, nearly wiping out the small settlement” ten years before, in 1771. The river’s unpredictable 199

white waters could smash through anything human-made or otherwise, sweeping farms, buildings and small islands away one day, then slip its millions of gallons silently over the boulders, lapping banks and nourishing marshes the next. 200

Of course it was the river, that very water power, that made development of the river for industry and transportation possible and successful. Flour mills and forges such as the precursor to Tredegar Iron Works proliferated along the falling waters. Motivated city planners and corporate investors mowed down woods and carved up riverbanks, leveled hillsides and filled in valleys until the seven hills of Richmond and old lands of the

Powhatan empire were unrecognizable. The bustling docks and sloping banks along the James River may have been the most racially inclusive areas of the city for work mostly, but recreation and leisure as well. Fishing was an activity for every level of society: industry fished for profit, some people fished for a living and even more fished simply to eat. “During the spring spawning runs, Richmond experienced a sort of fishing mania. On the tidal

portion of the river, great seine nets hauled in vast quantities of sturgeon, herring and, most important of all, shad. Those fish that made it past the seines faced a gauntlet of fishermen either tending fish traps or armed with nets and lines situated on the rocks, bridges and islands. The harvest could collect twenty thousand fish per day at the height of

199 _{John C. Van Horne, ed.,​The Correspondence of William Nelson​. Virginia Historical Society (Charlottesville:}

University of Press of Virginia. 1975), 155.

the run.” Cowley’s house was at the top of the hill by the governor’s house, when 12th 201 street seemed to be a straight shot downhill to the river. Surely he caught a fish or two for his evening meal.

The opportunities for residential, commercial and industrial development were obvious to city planners,who sought to maximize the city’s new political status and accompanying economic potential. Several significant infrastructure projects were launched during Cowley’s first decade as a free man, including the Capitol designed from plans that Thomas Jefferson mailed from France; the first state penitentiary, designed by English ex-patriot architect Benjamin Latrobe; and William Mayo’s toll bridge, across which Cowley would have traveled on errands to Chesterfield County. The James River and

Kanawha Canal (an initiative of George Washington’s) was perhaps the most disruptive to the city in that it required earth moving on a scale never before seen. The manpower required to engineer the landscape, cut and lay the granite stone blocks and construct all other aspects of the canal and its lock systems was enormous and drew hundreds of workers of all races, native and foreign-born, enslaved, bonded and free, from all over the country over a period of several years. 202

201 _{Potterfield, ​Nonesuch Place​, 27.}

Conclusion