Embrey Power Station : Virginia Electric and Power
Caroline and Forbes St
1-16-2012
fredericksburg.patch.com/articles/embrey-power-station-a-...
The station was built of reinforced concrete and steel and was “powered by water from an underground headrace extending from the water power company canal. Six electrically operated gates at the Embrey Dam controlled by switches at the power plant regulated the flow of water into the canal.” Water was stored at the power plant in storage silos and forced into turbines “which turned like dynamos” to produce 3,000 kilowatts.
In 1923, the power station had 60 employees and provided electricity for 1,011 customers, according to the brochure. Three years later, the customer base had jumped to 2,000. That same year, 1926, Virginia Electric Power Company bought Gould’s power plants and extended its power lines between Fredericksburg and Richmond.
Hydroelectricity held sway in the Fredericksburg area until the 1960s, when VEPCO shut down the power stations because of low Rappahannock River water levels.
The old Embrey Power Plant now is a shell — a broken shell — of its former self. In the plant’s heyday, the area around it served as the city’s industrial hub, with mills dotting the Caroline Street landscape along the Rappahannock River.
Next to Old Mill Park and sandwiched between residential areas, the Embrey Power Plant stands isolated near a handful of other sites in the Historic Old Mill District. Time or fire has reduced all but one of the other historic structures to portions, foundations or wheel pits. The only other structure still standing is the vertical, stained concrete “ruins” of Myers & Brulle’s Germania Flour Mill.
The future of the Embrey plant is cloudy at best. C & G Investment Properties LLC, headed by former Spotsylvania supervisor and businessman Hugh Cosner, owns the property. There had been talk about turning the place into a waterfront restaurant, but that idea seems to have drifted away.
So for the near, and perhaps distant, future it appears the Embrey Power Station will remain a hollowed-out husk. Instead of diners, its only regular visitors will be vagrants with beer cans and spray paint and the flock of geese that meanders up and down the Rappahannock, stopping to enjoy the field next to the station and drift in the secluded water running beneath the vacant building.
Embrey Power Station : Virginia Electric and Power
Caroline and Forbes St
1-16-2012
fredericksburg.patch.com/articles/embrey-power-station-a-...
The station was built of reinforced concrete and steel and was “powered by water from an underground headrace extending from the water power company canal. Six electrically operated gates at the Embrey Dam controlled by switches at the power plant regulated the flow of water into the canal.” Water was stored at the power plant in storage silos and forced into turbines “which turned like dynamos” to produce 3,000 kilowatts.
In 1923, the power station had 60 employees and provided electricity for 1,011 customers, according to the brochure. Three years later, the customer base had jumped to 2,000. That same year, 1926, Virginia Electric Power Company bought Gould’s power plants and extended its power lines between Fredericksburg and Richmond.
Hydroelectricity held sway in the Fredericksburg area until the 1960s, when VEPCO shut down the power stations because of low Rappahannock River water levels.
The old Embrey Power Plant now is a shell — a broken shell — of its former self. In the plant’s heyday, the area around it served as the city’s industrial hub, with mills dotting the Caroline Street landscape along the Rappahannock River.
Next to Old Mill Park and sandwiched between residential areas, the Embrey Power Plant stands isolated near a handful of other sites in the Historic Old Mill District. Time or fire has reduced all but one of the other historic structures to portions, foundations or wheel pits. The only other structure still standing is the vertical, stained concrete “ruins” of Myers & Brulle’s Germania Flour Mill.
The future of the Embrey plant is cloudy at best. C & G Investment Properties LLC, headed by former Spotsylvania supervisor and businessman Hugh Cosner, owns the property. There had been talk about turning the place into a waterfront restaurant, but that idea seems to have drifted away.
So for the near, and perhaps distant, future it appears the Embrey Power Station will remain a hollowed-out husk. Instead of diners, its only regular visitors will be vagrants with beer cans and spray paint and the flock of geese that meanders up and down the Rappahannock, stopping to enjoy the field next to the station and drift in the secluded water running beneath the vacant building.