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The Tunnel

Jun 05, 2021
In 1850 a team of Irish immigrants began digging a railroad

tunnel

through the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1858 the first train passed through that

tunnel

in 1944 the tunnel was closed but that was not the end of the story today if you stop by rockfish gap in the blue ridge mountains in front of you to the east is the virginia piedmont region behind you to the west is the shenandoah valley below you 700 feet below you is the claudius crozet blue ridge railroad tunnel hidden deep within from the heart of the mountains that has been waiting almost 80 years to be discovered.
the tunnel
This is the story of the creation and recreation of the Blue Ridge Tunnel you walk through. It's like a dream. You're almost walking. You have crossed this brush. you cross the tracks and then all of a sudden you see this opening on the east side, the rock bare and raw, I don't know the west, so often you drive past it and it's foggy and it's foggy inside the tunnel and it's just beautiful and the story of the Irish workers who came to this country were actually the back of the workforce doing the most difficult, most dangerous and lowest paid work, they were simply desperate people, desperate to make a living to survive, recognizing their contribution is another aspect significant of this project in 2001 the nelson county board of supervisors initiated a project to reopen the tunnel for public use over several years they generated an engineering plan and purchased the tunnel property from the csx railroad for one dollar these are the plans for the blue ridge tunnel rehabilitation and trail project the picture of the entire project basically phase one starts here at Afton Depot and then follows the original railroad alignment 3,400 feet to the tunnel entrance on the east.
the tunnel

More Interesting Facts About,

the tunnel...

Phase two is the rehabilitation of the four thousand two hundred tunnel. feet of the tunnel itself and then phase three would be a trail there that connects to Route 250. In 2014, Nelson County presented the project to engineering firms interested in bidding for the contract to restore the tunnel and I. m Kirsten Tinch I am the engineer of record for the project Sealed bids will be received at the Nelson County Administrator's Office, 84 Courthouse Square. Bids must be accompanied by a certified cash check or an acceptable bid bond of five percent of the base bid for all. bids over one hundred thousand dollars, can you reference on the plans a geotechnical report we have available?
the tunnel
I'm sure the east portal is not aligned with that first bulkhead. The other major work on the portal is the energy well wall above it. The water is going down and passing over the face, it's okay, thank you. We will visit the tunnel here later. I will tell you that I entered the east portal for the first time. I wore boots, they went up to my knees, but the water. I stepped over that boot and I had my boots full of water, so today I brought some hip boots to go in there. The trail to the east portal of the tunnel is more than half a mile and will require the construction of a gravel road and security fencing throughout the world.
the tunnel
World War II, the new tunnel was built just 50 feet from the old one to accommodate larger modern trains on the CSX line, although the rock walls are remarkably intact, considerable work remains to be done to control the flow of water that seeps through the mountain, but an even bigger challenge will be the removal of two massive 12-foot-thick concrete bulkheads that were installed in the 1950s to create a large chamber for propane storage; Unfortunately, the propane leaked as easily as the water leaked after several companies reviewed I was awarded the contract to the FCE Fielder's Choice Enterprises project.
It's clearly a treasure, it's a historical treasure that most people don't know much about and you can talk endlessly about how great it is, but you have to go. up there and walk through that tunnel to see it. My family is all Irish from the oil country. My father was an O'Brien and my mother had a dog or tea. I have been back and forth to Ireland several times. times i did an article about araglen, which is a famine village, an air glen has piles of rocks that used to be buildings and now it's sinking into the swamp, one day they got up and left, you can't eat grass forever and for welfare.
Irish in America at that time wasn't a proud thing, I mean the signs in the bars said no Irish or dogs allowed in the bar and they were a rowdy bunch and there's probably some justification for that but they came from tough places of scrabble. and hard lives at scrabble, I mean, this was a dangerous job, a lot of these guys were in a lot of pain all the time, cold, sad, unpleasant, eardrums gone from the explosion, maybe their hands were cut off, it's a job Pretty disgusting so here they are building Mr. Crosa's tunnel for a dollar a day the first image I had of this tunnel was this one and it was so powerful that so many layers of mythology could be attributed to it and this is just sifted dirt mixed together with an acrylic medium and then it is painted on the paper this color is of the brick and you can see that the color is exactly the color of the brick because it is the brick and that is earth a photograph is not real it is a piece of paper and this is real This is for and because of the place where it is Something like the DNA of the site for most of the semester.
We spent this course talking about the tunnel and preservation issues and learning from the Klonmoor research and we fell a little in love with the tunnel. I wanted to understand why the connection. at rockfish gap was so critical, another thing that sold us was the concentration of transportation networks and opportunities for tourism at this point, Highway 250, which was the old road from Stanton to Charlottesville Skyline Drive, which becomes Blue Ridge Parkway on Afton Mountain, Appalachia. trail that extends from Maine to Georgia and 1960s Interstate 64. 700 feet below is the Blue Ridge Tunnel. The most important picture was understanding the cultural landscape of the site, which included entering the lives of these Irish workers, so I created this map.
To try to put into context how many immigrants came to the United States between 1841 and 1860. It is obvious here that most of the immigrants who arrived during that time came from Ireland during the time when they were experiencing such difficulties to understand a little. More of the hardships they faced in the Potato Famine and where they came from helps understand how they were able to endure the circumstances and loss of life during the construction of this tunnel. The gentlemen who work in the tunnels are tunnel rats, rats in the. sewer ranch well that's what you're in a tunnel you're in a confined area and you better be a special individual to tolerate the kids working with their dad in the tunnel they held a star drill and turned it like their dad did hammering the star drill to make a hole big enough to put the dynamite in the black powder, I should say not dynamite, black powder, we didn't have dynamite in that time period, so they used black powder, which was very temperamental, we could say .
So there were a lot of kids who could have lost a finger, a hand, an arm, whatever. There was an Irish kid standing there and his dad was hitting the star drill and turning it and they got here. and they said: okay, that's enough and they put black powder in the hole and a fuse, and it came out. I know the first time I walked in here I got goosebumps and I've been in a lot of tunnels, but all of this inspired me. when I came in here because it's phenomenal and it needs to be preserved, it needs to be taken care of.
Think back to 1850 and the technology they had is quite an engineering feat. There's just no way to describe it other than that. It was wonderful that the Nelson County Board of Supervisors had committed to restoring the tunnel in 2001, but it was not until 2014 that the FCE company began work to clear the path to the eastern portal. A year later, Alan Hale reviewed the project with Nelson County staff and engineers from fce and vdot, the virginia department of transportation, a fence separating the active line from this trail, an eight-foot wire fence high, csx wanted a couple more feet, that's what we originally did, we were going to bring this much closer to grade, but we have modified the plans so it is still wheelchair accessible, but it will go down and back up, it appears to be sitting there, there's like two of them, a small one, let's see what it was like to get that down and you can't do it.
Upstairs you can't put it on a bench because you have rocks, we have a 350 with a 10,000 pound hammer, we will get up to get to it and we will grab a tat tat and we will dig a hole here for it to fall and divert the leak over the The portal It faces the rocky slopes along the sides of the harbour, so that's the idea: they're going to build something up there and the drainage will go down now. It's dry? Enter here? Is he still stopped behind? Here I thought I had drained all the water I could drain, but it's like two fire hoses coming out of the rock.
I can't do anything with it, I can't stop it, that's why we're walking there. to see what is still there in the 19th century 215,000 miles of railroad tracks were laid in the united states five times the length of the current interstate system in virginia several different companies were laying tracks on both sides of blue ridge the private company the The Virginia Central Railroad was making its way in this direction from Richmond and was actually working on the other side of the mountain at Waynesboro heading to Stanton and further west, but did not want to take on the really risky business of traversing the mountains with the tunnels the really hard work that had to be done so the richmond legislator decided to take it on they hired claudius crozet as chief engineer for the blue ridge railroad on a 17 mile stretch from the meacham river near what is now the city de crozet and had to slowly climb along the east side of the mountains, there he built three more tunnels.
The first tunnel was near the town of Greenwood and was actually the first tunnel completed. It also had brick arches all the way along as it progressed. On the side of the mountain he reached another area called Brooksville Hill, one of the most difficult tunnels, the rock and stone kept sliding, falling on top of the Irish workers who were below and just before reaching what is today the city. Afton was called then and is still called today the Little Rock Tunnels, it's only 100 feet long and then it slowly goes up the rest of the way and turns and goes through the mountain and out into the great Shenandoah Valley and then down to the south river at waynesboro that was the 17 mile stretch that claudio crossed was in charge of claudio crozet was born in france served as an engineer under napoleon emigrated to america taught mathematics at west point and served as the first president of the virginia military institute educated in polytechnic school and that was the beginning of the moment when they changed to a military system and that influenced everything he did the rest of his life and he used it later at west point and then as one of the founding fathers of vmi and that is one of the best ways to describe him extremely disciplined you would love to have him working for you you may not like working for him too crozet's great achievement was the design and construction of the almost mile long blue ridge tunnel the design of the tunnel It was his own adaptation instead of a Roman arch.
He chose the ellipse as a cost-saving means of excavating less cross section. The rock was extremely difficult and it took quite a while with the technology they had at the time. They worked in terms of feet per month, maybe 19 to 20 feet per month to advance the face, which again is very slow, which is why it took eight years to complete the longest tunnel in North America at the time, it was a remarkable achievement. and it is still the longest. Tunnel driven by manual drilling and black powder explosives. The American Society of Civil Engineers named it a National Historic Engineering Landmark.
They operated with a bank steering method, so they had a smaller tunnel near the crown, which is the area of ​​the roof we would be referring to. and drilled horizontally there into the face which left a bench behind the rest of the tunnel. They could drill vertically because it is easier to drill vertically than horizontally on the east side you have the raw and rough rock because this stone was so hard that it didn't need any support, while on this side it started to fly and the rock and dirt above They began to collapse, so they had to spend time and effort building beams and then behind the beams the bricklayers would come and so this end.
The tunnel has a brick arch and is lined with brick due to the instability of the rock and that is one of our main challenges in converting this from an industrial project to a rail tunnel to a civil project from rails to trails, so It is part of the next phase of repair. Renovate and make the tunnelssafer it is just a wonderful experience bringing people into the tunnel for the first time and what I have always noticed is that there is a lot of laughter, fun and excitement when we start and then it all gets very quiet.
The group becomes very quiet as they walk further and further into the tunnel, it becomes darker and darker and there is something that comes over you and you feel this eerie feeling that the Irish would come in here and then blow up the rock and then they would charge. They loaded it onto carts and took all the rock through the tunnel. One thing you can look at while you're standing here is the bricks going up the sides and over your head, so now if you're an Irishman working here, not only did you put that brick down, you did it six times and then You look up and think about putting bricks on your head, you're on scaffolding and you have to work your head off, how long did it take the Irish to build this house?
It took them eight full years to traverse the mountainside to make this tunnel. Do you know how many people worked in the tunnel? There was a team of about a hundred or so on this. A hundred men working on this side and a hundred men on the other side and they were working to meet in the middle and we know that when cholera hit in 1854 it killed 40 of the Irish that were working on both sides of the tunnel, yeah honey, What is Colorado cholera? It was a disease we know a lot about now, but back then it was a disease they were afraid of.
So do they sleep here at night? They had to sleep here. Yes, in the shanties for which they did their work. 8-10 hours and then we returned to the shanty, our assumption is that those shanties were grouped together, maybe 10 or 12 of them and we have some diaries stating that some people who had passed through there were able to sort out the small shanty town and how It was the way of life before, you mentioned people digging, some archaeologists, um, what have they found so far, they didn't find much more than pieces of a porcelain doll and what archeology often looks for.
It is garbage, things that were thrown away, were broken and could not be repaired, we hope to find where the shanties were on the side of the mountain, the only thing that tells us that there were people here are these platforms, this is not natural, none. of these platforms occurred because of erosion or whatever and historically those would be the Irish workers and the railway is right below us finding things that don't fit the local pattern, they fit the time period, but not what the people was doing here and the only thing that happens out of the ordinary at that time is that hundreds of Irish immigrants flood into this kind of small space.
They're not the biggest, but it's actually a white clay tobacco pipe for what they call Cuddies short stem clay tobacco so they can keep it. in their teeth while they worked and it was an easy way to put it in the pocket on the top of their hats and if you look at photographs from the 19th century, you will always see a clay stuffed animal where in Ireland they call them dudin. It becomes part of the whole hamburger stereotype, we look at these objects, you don't just know that they smoke, so we look at the deeper meaning of it in the Irish tradition, it was something very social, these were people who reaffirmed very close ties and becomes poignant here on the side of a mountain and that would be what we see through these artifacts that are reconstructing that culture or how they transform that culture to fit it into this kind of landscape foreign to them in 2015 the trail on the east side of the tunnel was completed and alan hale toured it with members of the blue ridge tunnel foundation, a group formed to generate local and regional support for the project, but which marked only the end of phase one, three years later in 2018, they began the work on phase two, the rehabilitation of the tunnel itself, including the removal of the 12 foot thick bulkheads, that day, as we exited the tunnel, something new appeared in the distance, almost a mile away, a point of daylight shining through the Blue Ridge Mountains, it was an echo of another great day in history. of the tunnel on December 29, 1856 Claudius Crozet managed to get both crews to meet in the middle, so they were finally able to report that daylight is now shining through the Blue Ridge Mountains and what was surprising, of course, was how close who were from each other.
We have seen in writing that between one inch and six inches from center line to center line, both sides met Dennis Shanahan. The story goes that his son moved from one team to another, so a little baby was the first to do so. go through the tunnel, a journalist wrote that day that there was a lot of celebrating and drinking and the next three words were hooray, hooray, hooray, this had been reported for so long, they're not done yet, they're not done yet, you know. Will they achieve it? Crozet doesn't know what he is doing, he received a lot of criticism for his experience.
There were really unexpected problems. He didn't expect mudslides because they were unusual east of the Allegheny Mountains and he certainly didn't expect them. a cholera epidemic didn't expect brick makers to make substandard bricks, so there were all sorts of things that held it back mary lyons has examined documents from the blue ridge railroad to write workers' stories this is a letter from john kelly, The contractor hired by Claudius Crozet to build the Blue Ridge Kelly Tunnel had emigrated in 1837 from County Cork in Ireland and many of the later immigrants he hired to work on the tunnel were also Corchians.
His letter of March 8, 1853 was a request for compensation for one of those workers. michael curran who had lost one of his hands due to a premature explosion of gunpowder inside the tunnel the work required of the irish was extremely dangerous in april 1853 there were collapses in the tunnels which killed two irish the irish went on strike and average once a year and in April they went on strike and in April 53 they went on a three week strike and they actually managed to raise their wages, so if you made a dollar twelve you had to go up to 125.
Crozet was humiliated and embarrassed by this and immediately all his letters of 1853 and early 1854 everything about slave labor we have that he essentially said in his very florid 19th century way get rid of the Irish workers claudius crozet approached the irish as if they were still in the military, they were soldiers and he was the general, so slave labor seemed to make a lot more sense to him, so George Faro, who owned him at the Brooksville Inn, said he could get him 40 to 50 able-bodied black men, according to he said, renting. outside of slave labor was everywhere, i mean, it was part of the economy that was built on slave labor in the 19th century, enslaved workers hired by their owners had built the university of virginia and built railroads all over the state, including the 17 miles of the blue ridge railroad enslaved men broke the rock into two-inch pieces of ballast and you prepared the track beds they hand-built embankments helping to build culverts tearing and clearing the land james williams was leased to the railroad at the age of 12.
He said they were hired out like horses, at least 300 enslaved men and boys worked on the Blue Bridge Railway, but until the contract with George Faro only Irish had worked inside the tunnel, he would estimate 800 Irish men and boys worked in tunnel 13 died, or exploded while doing blasting, accidental landslide and was crushed by these work carts, so George Faro insisted that the quote from the contract state said that the Negro will not be employed in loading or blasting on said work . 33 enslaved men worked in the Blue Ridge Tunnel in 1854, all of them. They appeared in the payroll record as apartments;
In other words, they removed the rocky debris after the explosion just weeks after the 33 enslaved men began working inside the tunnel. Claudius Crozet reported on an incident that occurred on the western slope of the mountain where a small group of enslaved laborers were transporting dirt in wagons that the railroaders named Flats Brooksville on April 29, 1854 to the Knights' Board of Public Works on Thursday. six, the blacks' supervisor told them they could go ahead and load the floors while he. had his breakfast, it seems that the engineer let the whole train go down the slope, some of our blacks and some of our peaceful strangers riding on the flats to check, probably too suddenly, the increase in speed of the train, the coupling pin to the side of the locomotive.
It broke as there was no brake on any of the floors, they descended the slope with increasing speed; The poor boys would suddenly have been safe if it had not been for the inexplicable circumstance that a flat had been left behind on the curve beyond the Winsborough depot, just off the main road a terrible collision occurred in which two black men were killed. The names of the two men were Jerry and Thomas. Their owners demanded and received twelve hundred dollars in compensation for each man. Meanwhile, inside the tunnel, the 33 slaves hauled rock for the rest of 1854, but the contract with George Faro was not renewed for 1855 and The enslaved men were never used again inside the tunnel they decided not to continue it they had to compensate the slave owners for the deaths of Jerry and Tom and due to the starvation of millions of The Irish were flooding the country and were expendable if one man flew in pieces there was another one that took its place until the tunnel itself, there's blood down there, you know, and pieces of telephone, I mean, these guys didn't just fall down. and they have a heart attack, they flew through the air and that's important to me.
I see it as a sacred place and sometimes I think well, those guys who flew through the air, what would they want? You know, they would want their work shown? and uh or They want to say: leave me, leave my bones alone. I don't know, the answer on one level is a certain fear and there's a certain sense of wonder at being here, almost a sense of this is stolen property, why are we here right now? We didn't build this. The ones who built the tunnel aren't theirs, but I think the fact that we're here is being communicated to them somewhere, maybe in unmarked graves around here, they're saying, well, I took the tugs long enough to get here. . but at least they're here now and we're going to put some psychic pressure on them to document us.
You know, there were hundreds of people here at one time, singing songs probably mostly in Irish and telling stories. To avoid getting bored and also to keep away thoughts of what they left in Ireland, the great famine, they saw people in their counties starving, they decided that the most vital and life-giving opportunity is to get on board a ship. We have never seen a ship in our lives. We've never been more than 10 miles from the family farm and what do you mean it's a new world? What do you do there? I think they came with a bit of daydreaming, but it also came with a lot of fear because they saw what had been happening in their homeland, so not only would there have been the sound of hammers here and the explosives going off, but there would have been violin fragments even here.
At the end of the day, if the violin was hit by a reel or a horn or whatever, he wanted to play, a lot of guys and the occasional wife, the occasional girlfriend, he would dance a little, so I think it's safe to say that right here. where we are. Standing right now, you could have easily seen people dancing to the beat of a foreign violinist. I love knowing about where I live. I think it's important to know where you live and be able to tell those stories every time I drive through the mountains. I listen to Irish music historic preservation is no longer just a house museum or architecture, it is stories and more and more people want their stories to be told.
If Stan and his group hadn't done all that research, we would never have felt that connection. I know why this is so important and you brought it all to life. It was a forgotten story. The tunnel is there. It's been abandoned for 70 years, but how did it get there? So the forgotten element is huge. I hadn't thought of it that way. but you're right, I was annoyed that it had been ignored or forgotten in 2018. Work continued on the western end of the tunnel, stabilizing the walls and repairing the bricks for the restoration of the tunnel. Nelson County received a number of grants from the Commonwealth. transportation board with vdot the virginia department of transportation overseeing the grants were federal funds intended for non-traditional transportation projects the budget for the entire project was $5.4 million in 2020 phase 3 construction of a trail to the western portal and the tunnel and trail were opened to the public 19 years after the project was conceived.
It's been a long road, but it's just fantastic. I think being able to get through this tunnel. There's really nothing like this in the country. Wannasay, in terms. from its design, its age and the way it is preserved, I mean, apart from the brickwork near the doorways, this is perfectly preserved just as it was when the trains arrived in 1858. Knowing what the Irish workers went through is magical to me know that I am today walking through what took them so long to build and what they gave their blood, sweat and tears to create and I am so excited that we can open this tunnel to the public and that more and more of us can enjoy it.
I know that everyone, for the first time, will be amazed when they pass by and I think that many of them, like me, will want to return.

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