What is “The Mother of All Rivers?
Oddly, “The Mother of All Rivers” is a term that has come to be applied to the James River of Virginia. Joel Furr once took a Government Administration class in graduate school; the class was mainly full of students from Furr’s public administration department but there were also two students from the forestry and wildlife department, including one guy named John Stanovic. John had spent the previous summer working on a fisheries project on the headwaters of the James River near the West Virginia border. Accordingly, EVERY SINGLE TIME he was called upon to do a paper presenting some proposal, it’d be based on fisheries management in the upper James headwaters. And EVERY SINGLE TIME he mentioned the James in his classroom reports, he wouldn’t just say “the James.” He’d say “when I was working on the James…” pause for dramatic effect, then continue, “the mother of ALL rivers,” and then go on. Every single freaking time. As far as any of the other students could tell, he barely even not
