The History—and Rebirth—of the Blue ridge Tunnel
A family of four emerged from the Blue Ridge Tunnel on a recent sunny afternoon, blinking in the sun. They stowed their headlamps and stepped to the side of the tunnel’s yawning entrance to drink water and allow others to pass. Behind them is a mile of darkness, a 4,237-foot train tunnel blasted through the Blue Ridge Mountains more than 170 years before, stretching back toward a dot of sunlight at the Shenandoah Valley entrance.
At its opening in 1858, the Blue Ridge Tunnel was an engineering marvel—the longest mountain tunnel in the world—and a vital western link for the Old Dominion. Today, it’s part of a thriving public trail beneath Rockfish Gap, some 500 feet under Skyline Drive and the Appalachian Trail near the southern entrance to Shenandoah National Park. But though the tunnel itself is as straight and true as it ever was—16 feet wide and 20 feet high—the tale of its creation and transformation is a winding one, stretching across three centuries.
It starts with a determined and irascible French military engineer in Virginia and twists across political feuds, labor strikes, a deadly epidemic, an engineering triumph, war, a century of hard commercial use, then abandonment and obscurity. Its modern resurrection as a public trail is as unlikely, in a way, as its creation.
Virginia Looks West
In the decades between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, Virginia’s status as the most prominent of the former colonies was waning. Rapid westward development meant several competing rail projects aimed to link eastern economies with western resources in the Ohio River Valley. But Virginia had a series of mountain-sized obstacles, first the gentle Blue Ridge, then the Alleghenies. By the end of the 1840s, the Virginia Legislature appointed an engineer named Claudius Crozet to build a tunnel through the Blue Ridge at Rockfish Gap so trains could head west.
Born in France and a veteran of Napoleon’s wars, Crozet was no stranger to Virginia. He’d come to the United States to teach at West Point and would eventually serve as one of the founding board members of the Virginia Military Institute. Described by some peers as irritable and lacking patience for politics, Crozet was nonetheless regarded as a gifted engineer, according to a 1989 biography by Robert F. Hunter and Edwin L. Dooley, Jr., of VMI. Fresh from a position in New Orleans, where he’d tried and failed to solve the city’s drainage issues, Crozet was back in Virginia by 1850, ready to make a hole through a mountain.
The Great Hunger
At the same time, a famine eventually known as the “Great Hunger” was driving millions of Irish toward American shores in search of work, including many trained miners. In her book, The Blue Ridge Tunnel, A Remarkable Engineering Feat in Antebellum Virginia, Charlottesville-based author Mary E. Lyons estimates that over 3,000 workers—mostly Irish from County Cork, but including family members, camp followers, and enslaved laborers—would work on the Blue Ridge Railway over the next decade. The railway project included several tunnels, but the largest was the Blue Ridge, connecting Waynesboro and the eastern side of the mountain.
Crews would use hand drills to bore holes in rock; the marks are still clear on the tunnel walls. Then a “blaster” would pack the hole with gunpowder and light a long fuse. After the explosion, crews—including children—would remove the rubble. On a good day, they’d make about a foot of progress. The boys earned 50 cents per day, the men about a dollar. Labor disputes began almost immediately, with workers going on strike when they heard rumors of higher pay for work on rail lines in Ohio. Crozet would eventually turn to local slave owners for additional work, paying the slavers with state money for the work of the enslaved.
In her book, Lyons catalogs much about the lives of the laborers on the mountain, as well as the deadly cholera epidemic that swept the Irish mountainside camps in the summer of 1854, killing 17 in just a few weeks. Amidst this, Crozet also had to solve the engineering challenge of creating what was then the longest mountain tunnel ever constructed. To add to the complexity, he’d started separate work crews on either side of the mountain, drilling toward each other with the hope of meeting in the middle. They relied on dead reckoning and calculation.
Dooley, one of the VMI-based authors of the 1989 book on Crozet, says he’s gratified that modern engineers appreciate how difficult it was. “The achievement reflects his dedication to his adopted state as well as his contributions to the new engineering profession of his day,” Dooley says.
Opening of the Tunnel
In tunnel lore, there’s an oft-repeated story that the workers from the east and west side broke through on Christmas in 1856. In truth, records indicate it was a few days later, December 29. Regardless, it would be almost two years before a train ran through it. By then, Crozet was already in Washington, D.C., working on his next project. True to form, he was also a little salty about the experience, mostly toward his political enemies. “To do everything for the best interest of others and be rewarded and treated thus!” he wrote to a friend.
As Originally Intended
The tunnel opened just in time for the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Stonewall Jackson used it to move Confederate troops from the Shenandoah Valley in 1862, and Union General Philip Sheridan captured the tunnel in 1865. And for most of the next century, it was used as intended, moving people and goods.
After World War II, the need for a larger tunnel caused the railroad to decommission the original. For the next 70 years it would sit abandoned, despite a short-lived effort to use its interior for gas storage in the 1950s. Local explorers would occasionally pass through, carefully navigating a concrete barrier in the middle. Then, around the turn of the millennium, a new idea started to take hold.
New Life for the Tunnel
Maureen Kelley, the economic development and tourism director for Nelson County, credits the original idea for the tunnel’s reopening as a public trail to former county administrator Stephen Carter. Like everything with the tunnel, it took a lot of effort, Kelley says. “It was 20 years of my life, and I’m not kidding,” she says.
For Nelson County, the renovation required several big efforts, including obtaining the tunnel property from CSX, the railway company that still owned it, and redrawing a border with Augusta County so both ends of the tunnel could be in Nelson County, qualifying it for federal aid. The trail reopened to the public in the fall of 2020, supported by a nonprofit called the Claudius Crozet Blue Ridge Tunnel Foundation, and has already seen more than half a million visitors.
Now, after about 70 years of silence, the tunnel echoes again with the sounds of life.
A family of four emerged from the Blue Ridge Tunnel on a recent sunny afternoon, blinking in the sun. They stowed their headlamps and stepped to the side of the tunnel’s yawning entrance to drink water and allow others to pass. Behind them is a mile of darkness, a 4,237-foot train tunnel blasted through the Blue Ridge Mountains more than 170 years before, stretching back toward a dot of sunlight at the Shenandoah Valley entrance.
At its opening in 1858, the Blue Ridge Tunnel was an engineering marvel—the longest mountain tunnel in the world—and a vital western link for the Old Dominion. Today, it’s part of a thriving public trail beneath Rockfish Gap, some 500 feet under Skyline Drive and the Appalachian Trail near the southern entrance to Shenandoah National Park. But though the tunnel itself is as straight and true as it ever was—16 feet wide and 20 feet high—the tale of its creation and transformation is a winding one, stretching across three centuries.
It starts with a determined and irascible French military engineer in Virginia and twists across political feuds, labor strikes, a deadly epidemic, an engineering triumph, war, a century of hard commercial use, then abandonment and obscurity. Its modern resurrection as a public trail is as unlikely, in a way, as its creation.
Virginia Looks West
In the decades between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, Virginia’s status as the most prominent of the former colonies was waning. Rapid westward development meant several competing rail projects aimed to link eastern economies with western resources in the Ohio River Valley. But Virginia had a series of mountain-sized obstacles, first the gentle Blue Ridge, then the Alleghenies. By the end of the 1840s, the Virginia Legislature appointed an engineer named Claudius Crozet to build a tunnel through the Blue Ridge at Rockfish Gap so trains could head west.
Born in France and a veteran of Napoleon’s wars, Crozet was no stranger to Virginia. He’d come to the United States to teach at West Point and would eventually serve as one of the founding board members of the Virginia Military Institute. Described by some peers as irritable and lacking patience for politics, Crozet was nonetheless regarded as a gifted engineer, according to a 1989 biography by Robert F. Hunter and Edwin L. Dooley, Jr., of VMI. Fresh from a position in New Orleans, where he’d tried and failed to solve the city’s drainage issues, Crozet was back in Virginia by 1850, ready to make a hole through a mountain.
The Great Hunger
At the same time, a famine eventually known as the “Great Hunger” was driving millions of Irish toward American shores in search of work, including many trained miners. In her book, The Blue Ridge Tunnel, A Remarkable Engineering Feat in Antebellum Virginia, Charlottesville-based author Mary E. Lyons estimates that over 3,000 workers—mostly Irish from County Cork, but including family members, camp followers, and enslaved laborers—would work on the Blue Ridge Railway over the next decade. The railway project included several tunnels, but the largest was the Blue Ridge, connecting Waynesboro and the eastern side of the mountain.
Crews would use hand drills to bore holes in rock; the marks are still clear on the tunnel walls. Then a “blaster” would pack the hole with gunpowder and light a long fuse. After the explosion, crews—including children—would remove the rubble. On a good day, they’d make about a foot of progress. The boys earned 50 cents per day, the men about a dollar. Labor disputes began almost immediately, with workers going on strike when they heard rumors of higher pay for work on rail lines in Ohio. Crozet would eventually turn to local slave owners for additional work, paying the slavers with state money for the work of the enslaved.
In her book, Lyons catalogs much about the lives of the laborers on the mountain, as well as the deadly cholera epidemic that swept the Irish mountainside camps in the summer of 1854, killing 17 in just a few weeks. Amidst this, Crozet also had to solve the engineering challenge of creating what was then the longest mountain tunnel ever constructed. To add to the complexity, he’d started separate work crews on either side of the mountain, drilling toward each other with the hope of meeting in the middle. They relied on dead reckoning and calculation.
Dooley, one of the VMI-based authors of the 1989 book on Crozet, says he’s gratified that modern engineers appreciate how difficult it was. “The achievement reflects his dedication to his adopted state as well as his contributions to the new engineering profession of his day,” Dooley says.
Opening of the Tunnel
In tunnel lore, there’s an oft-repeated story that the workers from the east and west side broke through on Christmas in 1856. In truth, records indicate it was a few days later, December 29. Regardless, it would be almost two years before a train ran through it. By then, Crozet was already in Washington, D.C., working on his next project. True to form, he was also a little salty about the experience, mostly toward his political enemies. “To do everything for the best interest of others and be rewarded and treated thus!” he wrote to a friend.
As Originally Intended
The tunnel opened just in time for the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Stonewall Jackson used it to move Confederate troops from the Shenandoah Valley in 1862, and Union General Philip Sheridan captured the tunnel in 1865. And for most of the next century, it was used as intended, moving people and goods.
After World War II, the need for a larger tunnel caused the railroad to decommission the original. For the next 70 years it would sit abandoned, despite a short-lived effort to use its interior for gas storage in the 1950s. Local explorers would occasionally pass through, carefully navigating a concrete barrier in the middle. Then, around the turn of the millennium, a new idea started to take hold.
New Life for the Tunnel
Maureen Kelley, the economic development and tourism director for Nelson County, credits the original idea for the tunnel’s reopening as a public trail to former county administrator Stephen Carter. Like everything with the tunnel, it took a lot of effort, Kelley says. “It was 20 years of my life, and I’m not kidding,” she says.
For Nelson County, the renovation required several big efforts, including obtaining the tunnel property from CSX, the railway company that still owned it, and redrawing a border with Augusta County so both ends of the tunnel could be in Nelson County, qualifying it for federal aid. The trail reopened to the public in the fall of 2020, supported by a nonprofit called the Claudius Crozet Blue Ridge Tunnel Foundation, and has already seen more than half a million visitors.
Now, after about 70 years of silence, the tunnel echoes again with the sounds of life.