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Breton Bay

One of the few large industrial sites still operating on the Potomac River, Breton Bay is the home of Breton Bay Water Transportation, a company that hauls barges of sand and gravel up the Potomac to Washington. Tugboats push barges, each capable of holding 900 tons, up the river, usually to mooring areas at Occoquan Bay near Woodbridge and in Washington at the South Capitol Street Bridge on the Anacostia. Another company, Goose Bay, operates sand and gravel barges along the Potomac in Charles County. Industrial use of the Potomac is a fraction of what it was in the early 1900s. The only remaining commercial traffic on the river, other than the sand and gravel barges, are occasional oil shipments and small ocean-going freighters that deliver one boatload of newsprint each week to the Robinson Terminal Warehouse in Alexandria.