Blue Ridge Tunnel

Beneath Rockfish Gap, the Blue Ridge Tunnel is one of the great engineering feats of the eighteen fifties. French-born engineer Claudius Crozet designed the passage to carry the Virginia Central Railroad through the Blue Ridge Mountains, and crews broke ground in eighteen fifty. The workforce was brutal work: roughly eight hundred Irish immigrants and forty enslaved Black laborers, drilling by hand through hard greenstone schist with pickaxes and black powder.

Eight years later, in eighteen fifty-eight, the tunnel opened at four thousand two hundred thirty seven feet, making it the longest railroad tunnel in the United States at the time. The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway used it for nearly a century before replacing it with a larger parallel bore in nineteen forty-four to handle wartime freight. The original tunnel now serves as a walking trail, a quiet dark passage through the mountain that still smells faintly of history.