Information Panel: The Jones Point Ropewalk

Jones Point Ropewalk exhibit

NPS / Claire Hassler

Quick Facts

Amenities

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Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits, Tactile Exhibit

The Long Story of the Jones Point Ropewalk 1833-1850

In 1833, Josiah Davis constructed a narrow, 400-yard-long building where rope was manufactured for ship's rigging, a once-thriving maritime industry for the nearby port of Alexandria. 

"...Every afternoon during the summer, it was the custom of the boys to go thither after school...to indulge in the luxury of a bath. They began to undress in the western part, and run naked through the long building...
At the entrance on the west there was a huge reel for rope, on which the boys used to stand and turn each other over, the rise and fall being probably twenty feet, and on occasion a boy threw out his back as he passed the second story window..."

Description of the abandoned Jones Point ropewalk, Academy Journal, June 3, 1873.

The Jones Point ropewalk was a two-story building with larger wheels than are pictured here, but the process of making rope was the same. Walking backward between two reels, a spinner unwound lengths of hemp from around the waist and spun the fiber in each hand to create rope. A spinner could walk as much as 20 miles in a 10-hour workday.

"In that building, long and low,
With its windows all a-row,
Like the port-holes of a hulk,
Human spiders spin and spin,
Backward down their threads so thin
Dropping, each a hempen bulk."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1859

Archeological Evidence

Excavations at Jones Point revealed the remains of the ropewalk's foundations and a black stain down the middle - probably from the tar applied to cordage to resist rotting from seawater.