Read time: 4 min.

Imagine this: you and I want to open a grist mill along a peaceful river. The water trickles in just enough to turn the wheel, but not enough to power our ambitions. What do we do? Why not blow it up? That’s exactly what Timothy Thistlethwaite did nearly 200 years ago, in a madcap adventure that forever reshaped the landscape.

I’m a little late when it comes to Thistlethwaite Falls. I first heard about it in 2019, when my mom and I spent a week at a log cabin nearby to research a Reconstruction-era diary written by one of our ancestors. Later, I was in town to try and find the flowing well at Springwood Park. I happened to have my drone with me and moseyed over to the falls to poke around. I’m glad I did! They’re fascinating.

The story of Thistlethwaite Falls goes back much further than its namesake- over 20,000 years, in fact. In those days, continental ice sheets a mile thick blanketed what’s now Richmond¹. As the Earth began to warm, melting ice unleashed torrents of water that carved deep into the land and shaped the foundation of the city we know today. These powerful forces unearthed a geological history stretching back an astonishing 500 million years.

Timothy Thistlethwaite’s story began much later, in Wilmington Delaware, where he was born in 1821. At eight, he moved to Richmond with his father, and the pair settled on a farm northwest of town. At twenty-five, Timothy struck out on his own by purchasing a twenty-year-old sawmill on the west fork of the Whitewater River². He soon acquired a nearby grist mill upstream³. 

At first, Thistlethwaite built an earthen dam across the Whitewater canyon at the south side of the rock ledge. By doing so, he created Thistlethwaite Pond, which sits just south of what later became Springwood Lake⁴. Digging a race allowed the water to pour down the hill to his grist mill, where he built a 40-foot water wheel⁵. 

That’s when things got exciting. To supercharge the power of his mill, Timothy Thistlethwaite teamed up with his brother-in-law, Joseph Ratliff, to reimagine the course of the river itself. Their bold plan? Carve a new channel over the ledge⁶. In 1854, armed with nothing but determination and “black giant powder⁷,” they blasted out a 47-foot waterfall. It forever changed the landscape and left a mark on history.

Thirstlethwaite ran the sawmill for five years before he built a paper mill with Ratliff and Miles Shine. Later, he purchased a grist mill. All three connected to the race he’d built, which was more than half a mile long. It’s said that local Quakers objected to his capitalist ways⁸, and Thistlethwaite eventually sold his mills to D. Bush and Company. He eventually turned his attention to manufacturing bricks, and died in 1901 at the age of seventy-nine⁹. 

Today, only a few remnants of Timothy Thistlethwaite’s ambitious mill survive. The pit beneath the falls that once ran the mill’s bull wheels and a portion of the old mill race both hint at the operation that once thrived there, but the most striking testament to his legacy is the falls themselves. As one of Richmond’s most curious features, they draw visitors and locals alike to experience a piece of the area’s past.

Sources Cited
1 Geologic History of the Gorge (n.d.) Soil & Water Conservation District. Richmond Parks Department [Richmond]. Sign.
2 Map Shows How Thistlethwaite’s Falls Were Formed (1948, April 13). The Richmond Palladium Item. p. 3.
3 Warfel, A. (1995, October 17). The Legend of Thistlethwaite Falls. The RichmondPalladium-Item. p. 11.
4 (See footnote 2).
5 (See footnote 2). 
6 Stegall, M. (1996, May 17). Marking of Thistlethwaite Falls important to historic preservation. The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 8.
7 (See footnote 3). 
8 (See footnote 3).
9 The Death Record (1901, May 13). The Richmond Evening Item. p. 1.