Afton Mountain and the Blue Ridge Tunnel

The community of Afton sits at Rockfish Gap, where the Blue Ridge drops away and the Shenandoah Valley opens to the west. Through the mountain here runs one of the great engineering achievements of the nineteenth century. The Blue Ridge Tunnel, designed by Claudius Crozet, a Napoleonic-era military engineer who later helped found the Virginia Military Institute, was bored through the mountain between eighteen fifty and eighteen fifty-seven entirely by hand.

Workers used black powder and hand tools, with no ventilation shafts, to cut four thousand two hundred thirty-seven feet of greenstone schist. About eight hundred Irish immigrants and forty enslaved men did the work. When it opened in April of eighteen fifty-eight, it was the longest railroad tunnel in the United States.

In nineteen forty-four a wider tunnel was bored alongside it; in twenty twenty the original was restored and reopened as a trail for hikers and cyclists.