came upon a large branch of the river, which we christened the Irvin, in honour of our learned professor. This river we forded with much difficulty and some danger, by reason of the hollow spaces betwixt the rocks, into which our horses plunged almost every step. The Irvin runs into the Dan about four miles to the southward of the line, and seemed to roll down its waters from the N. N. W. in a very full and limpid stream, and the murmur it made, in tumbling over the rocks, caused the situation to appear very romantic, and had almost made some of the company poetical, though they drank nothing but water. We encamped on a pleasant hill, overlooking the river, which seemed to be deep every where except just where we forded. In the mean time, neither that chain of rocks, nor any other that we could observe in this stream, was so uninterrupted, but that there were several breaks where a canoe, or even a moderate flat-bottomed boat, might shear clear. Nor have we reason to believe there are any other falls (except the great ones, thirty miles below Moniseep ford) that reach quite across, so as to interrupt the navigation for small craft."The name Irvine River, occasionally spelled Irvin or Irwin River, appears in land deeds as early as the 1730s, and is first depicted on a map drawn by Edward Moseley in 1737. This name persisted through the late eighteenth century among colonial administrators in eastern and central Virginia, notably depicted and labeled on the Fry-Jefferson map of 1755. As early as 1743, land entries were being made in reference to "Smith's River," a seemingly new name for what those in other parts of Virginia referred to as the Irvine River. Regional historians believe that this name, as well as the Smith Mountains, have their origins with two prominent landowners of the early 1740s, Gideon and Daniel Smith. From the mid eighteenth through the mid nineteenth century, the names "Smith's River" and "Irvine River" were used interchangeably, the former used as a regional vernacular, the latter as an administrative reference By the mid to late nineteenth century; however, the name "Smith River" become commonplace, as Irvine fell out of use. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Smith River emerged as an important source of water power for lumber and textile mills. Initially supplying