Old Fort: Where the Railroad Climbed the Blue Ridge

Old Fort sits at the foot of the Blue Ridge, the last flat ground before the mountains begin in earnest. For most of American history this was the end of the road, the westernmost frontier outpost in colonial North Carolina, and later the place where railroad engineers stared up at a wall of rock and had to figure out how to get a train over it.

Between eighteen seventy-five and eighteen seventy-nine, they dug seven tunnels through the Blue Ridge just above this town using picks, shovels, and nitroglycerin. More than three thousand laborers built that stretch, more than ninety percent of them incarcerated Black men working under the convict-lease system, arrested for minor infractions and leased to the railroad as something very close to slave labor. At least one hundred thirty-nine of them died. The tunnels are still in use today.

Old Fort has never grown large. It remains a town of around eight hundred people, sitting where the Catawba River begins and the mountains take over.