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As a 10-year-old, Bill Trout asked a question about an old lock on the James River. The lack of an answer from the adults around him sent Trout into a life dedicated to canals and locks, to river visits all over the world, and to creating guidebooks for waterways in Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina.
Holt Messerly
A little over 70 years ago, American Canal Society founder and Virginia Canals & Navigations Society director, Bill Trout, attended a fieldtrip that would change his life. While hiking with his Boy Scout troop along the James River in Richmond, Virginia, 10-year-old Trout spotted the stone remains of one of the nation’s oldest canal locks and asked what it was.
“Lucky for me, our guide didn’t know the answer and I was left to research things on my own,” he laughs. “If that wouldn’t have happened, my life might’ve been very different.”
Visiting the library, Trout discovered the structure was part of the ruins of the James River and Kanawha Canal—a project dating to George Washington and others’ efforts to develop a commercial trade route linking the James and Ohio rivers in the 1780s. “I became fascinated,” he says. “Here was all this history, right here in our backyard, and no one seemed to know much about it. It was quite the treasure hunt.”
While Trout went on to earn his doctorate in biology and worked for 25 years as a genetic researcher in Los Angeles, his interest in canals was steadfast.
“If I’d thought I could make a living studying them, that’s what I would’ve pursued,” he says. “However, in those days, it wasn’t really an option. So, for me, it became an extremely immersive hobby.”
With his work as a researcher carrying him to scientific conferences around the world, Trout took vacation days to explore canals in places like Russia, France, China, England, and other nations. Then, in 1972, he helped found the ACS.
“There were sites all along the East Coast that were in danger of being lost and we wanted to do something to preserve them before they vanished,” he says. “So, I worked with two others to create a national organization that would help manage, restore, protect, and offer advice for the recreational use of historical canals.”
Five years later, in 1977, hoping to protect the structures closest to his heart, Trout founded the VC&NS.
“The name was a mouthful, but we wanted to include all the waterways in the state that’d featured commercial or passenger navigation,” he says. That way, the organization could serve as a vessel for the preservation of canals and waterways, as well as their history and lore.