Blue Ridge Tunnel: The Mountain Claudius Crozet Drove a Hole Through

At Rockfish Gap, where Skyline Drive ends and the Blue Ridge Parkway begins, the Blue Ridge presented a wall that nineteenth-century railroad engineers simply could not go around. In eighteen fifty, construction began on a tunnel through solid greenstone schist. The engineer was Claudius Crozet, a French-born graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique who had served under Napoleon, taught at West Point, and helped found the Virginia Military Institute.

Many hundreds of Irish immigrants, along with dozens of enslaved Black laborers, dug through the mountain with hand tools for eight years. At least fourteen Irish workers died in accidents; two enslaved men were killed when a runaway rail car broke loose, and a third died in a handcar accident the next month. When the attorney general weighed in on those deaths, his ruling addressed compensation to the enslaved men's owner, not to the men's families. The tunnel opened on April thirteenth, eighteen fifty-eight at four thousand two hundred thirty-seven feet long, the longest tunnel in the United States at the time. It carried trains for eighty-six years, until a wider bore replaced it in nineteen forty-four. Today it is a walking trail.