Rockfish Gap: Mile Zero and Two Hundred Years of Crossings

The gap you are passing through has been one of the most strategically important notches in the entire Blue Ridge. At nineteen hundred feet, low enough for wagons, high enough to survey two valleys, Rockfish Gap has been the site of a surprising number of consequential decisions.

In August of eighteen eighteen, Thomas Jefferson rode up from Charlottesville to a tavern here with twenty-three other Virginia commissioners. Their assignment was to choose a location for a new state university. Jefferson had stage-managed the meeting carefully, the proposed site at Central College in Charlottesville was already mostly his design. The commissioners voted as he hoped, and the report they issued from Rockfish Gap that summer became the founding document of the University of Virginia. The document is still called the Rockfish Gap Report.

The gap mattered for freight before it mattered for education. In the eighteen forties and fifties, engineer Claudius Crozet directed the excavation of the Blue Ridge Tunnel directly beneath the gap, four thousand feet of hand-drilled and blasted passage through solid granite, which opened to railroad traffic in eighteen fifty-eight as the longest railroad tunnel in North America at the time. Hundreds of Irish and enslaved workers dug it, and their labor stitched the Shenandoah Valley to the Virginia Piedmont in ways that wagons never could.

Today Rockfish Gap is a layered crossroads. Interstate Sixty-Four punches through on one side. United States Route Two-Fifty, the old turnpike road, threads the gap itself. Skyline Drive ends here at its southern terminus after one hundred five miles along the Shenandoah ridge. And the Blue Ridge Parkway begins here, or ends here, depending on your direction, at milepost zero, heading south toward Great Smoky Mountains National Park four hundred sixty-nine miles away.

No single gap in the southern Appalachians carries more history per square mile.