Stumphouse Tunnel and the Railroad That Never Finished

The Stumphouse Mountain Tunnel in Oconee County, South Carolina, is approximately sixteen hundred feet long. It does not go anywhere. It was designed to pass through the Blue Ridge Mountains as part of the Blue Ridge Railroad, a line intended to connect Anderson, South Carolina, to Knoxville, Tennessee, opening trade routes between the South Carolina upcountry and the Tennessee Valley. Construction began in eighteen fifty-six. Workers, primarily Irish immigrants and enslaved Black men, spent about three years hand-drilling and blasting through the granite and gneiss of the mountain. They reached sixteen hundred feet into the planned nearly six-thousand-foot bore.

Then the money ran out. The railroad company defaulted on its bonds in eighteen fifty-nine, one year before the war began that would end the economic and political conditions under which the project had been planned. The tunnel was abandoned with its far end still sealed in solid rock. The workers dispersed. The mountain swallowed the opening.

Today the tunnel, inside Stumphouse Mountain Heritage Preserve, is open for walking. The constant fifty-one-degree temperature and the steady seep of water from the walls have made it a destination for hikers seeking relief from South Carolina summers, and, for a period in the nineteen fifties and sixties, it was used by Clemson University dairy scientists as a cheese-curing facility, a use that has entered local legend as perhaps the most unanticipated second act for an abandoned infrastructure project in the state.

The Sumter National Forest surrounds the area, covering nearly four hundred thousand acres of South Carolina's Piedmont and Blue Ridge foothills, and the Chattooga River, which forms part of the SC-Georgia border nearby, is one of the few undammed rivers in the southeastern United States, designated as a Wild and Scenic River since nineteen seventy-four.