Tunnel Hill, Georgia

Tunnel Hill takes its name from one of the engineering feats of the antebellum South. In eighteen fifty, the Western and Atlantic Railroad bored a tunnel through Chetoogeta Mountain here, creating a fourteen-hundred-foot passage that was the first major railroad tunnel in the South. Hundreds of Irish and enslaved workers carved it by hand through solid rock, working from both ends toward the middle.

The tunnel allowed the W-and-A line to push through the Appalachian ridges and connect Atlanta to Chattanooga, a route that became the strategic spine of the Deep South's rail network. During the Civil War, Union General William Sherman targeted and eventually controlled this same corridor in his eighteen sixty-four Atlanta Campaign. The original tunnel still exists, open to visitors, and a heritage center in town tells the story of the workers who built it.