On a cold October morning in 1867, thirteen men climbed into an iron bucket and began the five-minute descent into darkness. The cable sang above their heads as the bucket dropped past timber-lined walls slick with seepage, down 583 feet to the wet floor of the Hoosac Tunnel’s central shaft. They carried oil lamps and drills and the knowledge that they were paid extra for the danger of this work, a fact the surface crews resented and the shaft crews never forgot. Above them, in the cluster of wooden buildings around the shaft head, a candle burned in the gasometer house.
A leak of naphtha gas drifted near the open flame. It ignited. The flame jumped to the supply of explosives stored above ground. The hoisting house caught fire, the wooden head structure collapsed, and burning timbers, iron fittings, and the great iron bucket’s machinery fell 583 feet straight down onto the men below.
The pumps burned with everything else. Water began rising from the broken seeps in the rock. On the surface, men fought the fire for hours. By nightfall the head was a heap of charred timber and the shaft was a chimney full of smoke, with no way to lower another bucket and no way to reach the thirteen men trapped below.
In the days that followed, workers dropped a heavy weight on a rope down the shaft, sounding for life. Some thought they heard hammering. Others listened and heard nothing. The decision was made to seal the shaft, smother the fire, and rebuild before any rescue attempt could begin.
It was a year before anyone reached the bottom again. When the rescue party finally descended in October 1868, they found the bodies of the thirteen men. They also found a crude wooden raft, built by hand at the bottom of the shaft from broken timbers, evidence that some of the men had survived for hours, or days, and had tried to keep themselves above the rising water before the air gave out. That shaft was the heart of a promise made twenty years earlier.
In 1855, two men stood on opposite sides of the Hoosac Range in western Massachusetts and told the state they could bore a railroad straight through 4¾ miles of granite. Thomas Doane, a quiet surveyor from Cape Cod, and Herman Haupt, a West Point engineer from Philadelphia, were proposing something the United States had never attempted. The longest railroad tunnel in the country at that moment was less than a mile long. Doane and Haupt promised a bore nearly five times longer, cut through Precambrian gneiss, granite, and mica schist, some of the oldest and hardest stone on the continent.
Above the line of the bore the mountain rose more than 1,700 feet of solid rock; above the central shaft, the overburden alone exceeded 1,000 feet. European engineers had said the stone could not be cut by any tool then known. Doane was born September 20, 1821, in Orleans, a fishing village on the elbow of Cape Cod. His father ran a small academy, and Thomas studied at Phillips Academy in Andover before apprenticing three years in the engineering office of Samuel Felton in Charlestown.
He was a careful man who measured twice and spoke softly. He carried a leather notebook into the field, and his entries were so precise that other engineers borrowed his sight lines for years after he left a project. When the Hoosac board appointed him chief engineer in 1863, he was forty-one and had never failed a survey in his life. Haupt was born March 26, 1817, in Philadelphia and graduated from West Point in 1835 at eighteen, then resigned his commission almost immediately for the railroad trade.
He worked the Horseshoe Curve and the Gallitzin Tunnels in the Alleghenies for the Pennsylvania Railroad and served as its general superintendent from 1849 to 1851. When Massachusetts hired him in 1856 to take over the Hoosac project, he was thirty-nine, already the most respected tunnel engineer in America, and about to lose his fortune to a mountain that did not care about his reputation. What neither man knew in 1855 was that the rock itself was a lie. Edward Hitchcock, the state geologist, had walked the surface of the Hoosac Range with a hammer in 1851 and told the legislature the stone was uniform hard gneiss from portal to portal.
No test borings were taken. Hitchcock had guessed from outcrops, and inside the mountain the truth was crueler. The east end was dense gneiss, as advertised. The center was the hardest stone of all, granite so tight that hand drills shattered against it.
The west end, near North Adams, was a band of crumbling, water-saturated rock the workers called porridge stone, a material so soft that the men complained it was like trying to build a sandcastle in the mud. Hitchcock had been wrong about almost everything, and the men with hammers paid for the mistake. The work began after the state authorized a credit of two million dollars. Edward Serrell took the first contract in 1854 and brought a strange machine to the east portal, a steam-driven boring engine meant to chew the rock like a giant wood plane.
It worked for exactly ten feet before seizing solid in the granite, and the workmen called it the elephant. They left it where it stood and picked up their hand drills. When Haupt took over in 1856, he found the east heading less than seventy feet inside the mountain. He fired Serrell’s crew, brought in his own teams, and went back to the oldest method known to mining: two men with steel drills and a sledgehammer.
One held the drill against the rock face while the other swung the hammer. Between blows, the holder turned the drill a quarter turn so the cutting edge bit fresh stone. They worked in pairs for eight hours at a stretch, and a good pair could sink a single hole about a foot deep in an hour. When a row of holes was drilled, they packed them with black powder, ran a slow fuse, and ran.
The blast threw maybe two cubic yards of rock onto the floor, and the muckers carried it out by hand to the dump pile. In the best month under hand drilling, Haupt’s crews advanced the east heading about fifty feet. Facing 25,081 feet of tunnel from portal to portal, that rate meant more than forty years to finish. Every man on the project knew the only way the bore would ever be cut was if the work itself got faster, and the answer came from a machine shop in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
Charles Burleigh, a mechanical engineer born in 1824 at the Putnam Machine Works, had spent his career taking other men’s bad ideas and making them work. In 1865 he turned to an old European problem, the compressed air rock drill. French and Italian engineers had tried for years to make a pneumatic drill that could survive hard rock; none lasted more than a few hours before the cylinders cracked or the valves jammed. Burleigh redesigned the mechanism with heavier cast iron, simpler valves, and a piston stroke timed for American granite.
His drill weighed 372 pounds, was clumsy, leaked air, and had to be carried into the heading on a wooden frame mounted to a portable carriage. But it worked. In June 1866 the Burleigh drill went into the east heading for its first field trial. The first runs were rough; the drills broke down often and the compressed air pipes leaked at the joints.
By November, Burleigh and his crew had redesigned the weak parts, and the second generation went in and stayed. On the east side of the mountain, a wooden water-powered compressor house pumped air to sixty-five pounds per square inch through two eight-inch cast-iron pipes that ran a quarter mile into the bore. The numbers told the story: before the Burleigh, the best month at the east heading was about fifty feet; after it was running smoothly, the advance climbed to roughly 150 feet a month. A threefold increase, achieved not by working the men harder but by changing the tool in their hands.
A hole that used to take an hour now drilled itself in fifteen minutes, freeing the men to load powder, set fuses, muck rock, and turn the next round. The Burleigh drill did not replace them. It multiplied them. But black powder was too slow and too weak for the deep holes the Burleigh could now drill, and Doane and his consulting engineers needed something stronger.
They turned to a new chemical that had reached America from Sweden by way of Alfred Nobel: nitroglycerin. It was a beautiful, terrifying liquid. A few drops could shatter a steel anvil; a small bottle could turn a freight wagon into a hole in the ground. American railroads refused to ship it because too many cars had vanished in mysterious explosions along the line.
And in a small chemistry shop in North Adams, a single immigrant chemist was about to turn it into the most powerful blasting agent the country had ever seen. His name was George Mowbray. He was born May 15, 1815, in Lewes, England, studied chemistry in England, France, and Germany, immigrated to New York in 1858, and became a naturalized citizen. He spent years in the oil fields near Titusville, Pennsylvania, using nitroglycerin to shoot dead wells back into production, and when the post-war oil depression of 1866 broke his refinery, he moved to North Adams and offered his services to the tunnel.
In 1867 Doane accepted. Mowbray built a small works on a wooded ridge near the West Portal, far from any house, and developed his own method for making a more purified form of the liquid he called trinitroglycerin. Over the life of the project his works produced more than half a million pounds of explosive for the bore. The story that captures Mowbray’s contribution is a sled and a snowstorm.
One winter morning in 1868, a teamster was hauling nitroglycerin in glass jars down the wagon road from the works to the West Portal when the sled hit a rut and overturned, sending the jars rolling into a snowbank. Every man on the road expected the valley to go up. Nothing happened. The jars sat in the snow for hours, and when Mowbray came down to inspect them he found the liquid frozen solid.
He took the jars back to his laboratory, thawed them in warm water, and tested the contents. The chemistry was unchanged. Frozen nitroglycerin was completely inert, and once thawed and detonated, it worked exactly as before. Mowbray had discovered by accident that frozen nitroglycerin could be transported safely.
From that morning on, every shipment from the North Adams works went out frozen, and workers in the tunnel thawed the charges in heated water baths just before loading them into the drill holes. The accident rate dropped and the pace climbed again. Mowbray also developed the electric blasting cap. Before the Hoosac, miners detonated charges with slow-burning fuses; the man who lit the fuse had to run while the spark crept toward the charge, and misfires and premature detonations were common.
Mowbray’s shop built a small copper cap filled with mercury fulminate that fired the nitroglycerin on an electric current from a hand-cranked magneto at a safe distance. Crews could now load a full round of twenty or thirty holes, run a single wire out of the heading, and fire them all at once on the turn of the crank. The Hoosac was the first major American civil project to fire its charges by electricity, and the technique spread quickly to the mines and quarries of the Appalachians. Every modern blasting cap in use today is the great-grandchild of the cap Mowbray and Doane fired into the Hoosac granite in 1868.
By 1868 the east and west headings were both moving at a steady pace under Burleigh drills and Mowbray’s frozen nitroglycerin. A typical round went like this: the Burleigh drill cut a pattern of twenty-four to thirty holes in the rock face, each about an inch and a quarter wide and four to six feet deep. Workers withdrew the drill and loaded each hole with a measured charge of nitroglycerin in a paper or copper cartridge, ranging from six pounds at the lighter end to fifty at the heavier. They connected the charges with electric blasting wire, ran the wire to a safe distance, and fired the entire round.
The blast threw five to eight cubic yards of rock onto the floor. Crews mucked out the rubble, advanced the timbering, and the drill came back for the next round. Day shift, night shift, year after year. The west portal was a separate war.
When crews first cut in at the North Adams end, they ran straight into the porridge stone Hitchcock had never warned anyone about. The rock face wept water. The roof of the bore sagged within hours of being cut. On October 3, 1869, six inches of rain fell on the Hoosac in a single afternoon.
A small brook above the line of the tunnel overflowed, found a crack in the porridge stone, and poured straight into the west heading, filling it with water, sand, and broken rock for hundreds of feet. The workers spent weeks digging out what the storm had buried. To hold the west portal open at all, the engineers walled the bore with a brick arch. Brick yards opened in North Adams to keep the masons supplied, and crews of bricklayers worked alongside the drillers building a circular tube of brick six to eight courses thick that ran from the portal more than 7,000 feet into the mountain.
Over the life of the project the masons laid more than twenty million bricks, so heavy and dense that more than a century later freight trains still ride under the same arch. The men who laid it could not see beyond the lantern light, could not stand upright in some sections, and worked through dripping water that ran from the roof onto their hands all night. The workforce numbered eight to nine hundred men at the peak, most of them experienced hard rock miners from Cornwall, men who had grown up cutting tin from Cornish granite. They worked alongside Irish and German immigrants, Danish and French-Canadian laborers, and a small number of native New Englanders.
The crews ran three eight-hour shifts around the clock, with 750 men on the rolls at any one time and shift changes at six in the morning, two in the afternoon, and ten at night. They lived in boarding houses in Florida and North Adams, in shacks along the wagon roads above the central shaft, and in temporary railside dormitories. They were paid weekly, drank in the saloons of North Adams on Saturday night, and were back at the heading by Monday morning. The small towns on either side of the range still carry the family names of the men who came.
The headings from the portals alone were not enough. Doane had calculated, correctly, that a tunnel nearly five miles long could not be ventilated by the portals alone; the smoke from a single steam locomotive would suffocate the next train. He proposed a third attack on the mountain, sunk straight down from the surface to the line of the bore. Work on the central shaft began in 1863 under Doane’s direct supervision.
The shaft was twenty-seven feet long by fifteen feet wide, planned to sink more than 1,000 feet straight down until it intersected the tunnel grade. From the bottom, two new headings could be driven east and west to meet the headings from the portals, and the shaft would serve as the permanent ventilation chimney of the finished tunnel. Sinking it was its own slow war. A steam-powered hoisting engine lowered an iron bucket on a wire cable and pulled it back up loaded with broken rock.
The walls had to be lined with timber as the shaft went down to keep rock from spalling onto the men below, and the deeper it went, the more water seeped in; pumps ran around the clock. By 1867 the shaft was 583 feet deep, more than half the planned depth, with thirteen men working day shift at the bottom. The men descended in a wooden bucket lit by a single oil lamp, a five-minute drop into darkness with the cable singing above their heads. At the bottom they worked on a wet floor of broken rock under a ceiling that grew higher with every blast.
The air was cold and heavy, and the smoke of the blasts hung in the shaft for hours because there was no through draft to clear it. The men ate their dinner in the hoist bucket on the ride to the surface. Doane spent more time on that shaft than on any other part of the project, going down the bucket himself almost weekly to inspect the work, walk the center line, and check the alignment marks his survey crews had transferred to the rock. The fire on October 17, 1867, stopped the tunnel work for almost a year.
When the new hoisting house was built, the new pumps were running, and the water had been drawn down to the working level, the sinking began again. The shaft reached its final depth of 1,028 feet on August 13, 1870, and new crews began driving headings east and west under Doane’s resurveyed line. The alignment work above that shaft is the part of the story engineers still talk about 150 years later. Doane faced six separate faces of excavation: two headings from the east portal, two from the west portal, and two from the central shaft, all of which had to meet perfectly on a line running straight under more than a thousand feet of rock.
There was no way to see from one heading to another, no satellite, no laser, no GPS. Doane had a brass surveyor’s transit, a steel chain, a plumb bob, and his notebook. His solution was elegant: he built six wooden survey towers on the highest peaks of the Hoosac Range, each lined up with the planned route of the tunnel below. From the top of each tower a surveyor sighted through a transit straight along the line to the next tower.
Down at the portal, a second surveyor sighted upward at the tower, transferred the line into the bore by lowering a plumb bob from the tunnel ceiling, and marked the center line on the rock face with chalk and string. Doane and his crew rebuilt those sight lines and rechecked them every few weeks. When the central shaft was sunk, he ran the line down on a heavy plumb bob hung from a wooden frame at the top, transferring the same surface line to the bottom so the two new headings could be driven along the correct azimuth. The mathematics was nineteenth-century trigonometry, handwritten in pencil in Doane’s leather notebook.
The instruments were the best brass transits available from the workshops of New York, but still hand instruments. The men on the towers held the sight lines on cold mornings and in summer rain. They corrected for the curvature of the earth over a baseline of nearly five miles, for the heat of the sun on the metal of the transit, for the sag of a plumb bob string in a deep shaft. They were doing by hand the work modern tunnel engineers do with laser theodolites and computer software, across a longer baseline than almost any tunnel built before.
When the central shaft headings drove east and west and met the headings from the portals, the surveyors checked the closing point with chains and transits. The east heading from the central shaft met the heading from the east portal on December 12, 1870. The west heading from the central shaft met the heading from the west portal in November 1873. Across more than four miles of straight bore through six separate faces, the closing error of the alignment was 9/16 of an inch, the thickness of a thumbnail across a line longer than the deck of an aircraft carrier.
Some modern engineers who have studied the Hoosac survey say no hard rock tunnel built since by hand methods has matched that accuracy. Doane himself was not there to see the final hole through. By 1869 his contract with the state had ended, and the bond holders sent him west. He took a job in Nebraska building 240 miles of railroad on the extension of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, and laid out and named nearly all the towns along that line.
One of them, a small farming town in eastern Nebraska, kept the name Doane in his honor; Doane College, today Doane University, was founded there and named for him. He returned to the Hoosac project in 1873 as consulting engineer, just in time to walk the finished bore. Herman Haupt, the man who had taken the first contract in 1856, was long gone. He had pushed the east heading more than 4,250 feet into the mountain before the state government, lobbied by the rival Western Railroad, cut his funding in 1861.
Haupt poured his own money into the project trying to keep it alive and went bankrupt. He left the Hoosac and went south, where the Civil War was beginning. President Abraham Lincoln appointed him chief of the United States Military Railroads in 1862, and Haupt rebuilt bridges and rail lines for the Union Army for two years before returning to private engineering. He died in Jersey City on December 14, 1905, at eighty-eight, still remembered as one of the great railroad engineers of his century.
The men who finished the tunnel were the Shanly brothers, Walter and Francis, two Canadian civil engineers from Ireland who took the final contract in December 1868 for $4,594,268. Walter was born October 11, 1817; Francis, October 29, 1820. They had built the Welland Canal in Canada and understood big stone work, and they took on the Hoosac when no American contractor would touch it. The Shanlys pushed the work hard for five years, using Burleigh drills, Mowbray’s nitroglycerin, electric blasting caps, and steam-powered hoists, all the new tools the first half of the project had invented one at a time.
They closed the bore on Thanksgiving Day, 1873, when the last sixteen feet of rock between the west portal heading and the central shaft heading was blasted away. The men on either side had been listening to each other’s drills for weeks. When the final round was loaded and fired, the smoke cleared and the lantern light from one side shone through to the other for the first time in twenty years. The workers stepped through, shook hands in the lantern light, and the bore was closed end to end.
The first train ran through the tunnel on February 9, 1875, almost twenty years after the first contract was signed. A locomotive named the N. C. Munson sat at the east portal with its boiler hot and its bell ringing.
Thomas Doane was at the controls, the man who laid the line, built the towers, taught Mowbray where to put the nitroglycerin works, and showed the masons where to spring the brick arch. He climbed into the cab, the engineer eased the throttle forward, and steam hissed up into the cold February air. The locomotive moved into the granite, and the iron rails carried it under more than 1,700 feet of rock for almost five straight miles, out the west portal into North Adams, where the people who had lived twenty years with the sound of blasting under their mountains stood along the line and cheered. The bore had cost about twenty-one million dollars in 1875 money, ten times the original estimate.
It had taken about twenty years from the first contract to the first train. It had broken Herman Haupt and three contractors before it was done, and it had cost the lives of every man whose name is written on the stone in Florida, Massachusetts. It had also given American engineering three tools it would carry into every later tunnel, mine, and canal: the Burleigh pneumatic drill, the industrial use of nitroglycerin, and the electric blasting cap. Those three tools went west on the next generation of railroads.
The men who finished the Hoosac took them to Colorado for the silver mines of Leadville, to Nevada for the deep workings of the Comstock Lode, to the Pennsylvania anthracite coal fields. By 1880 every major hard rock mine in the United States was running compressed air drills and electric blasting caps. The Hoosac was the proving ground. Charles Burleigh died in 1883, his drills by then standard equipment in mines on three continents.
George Mowbray died in 1891, his frozen transport method still in use for handling dynamite shipments. Walter Shanly served in the Canadian Parliament after the Hoosac. Francis Shanly died in 1882. Thomas Doane lived to see his tunnel run trains daily for twenty-two more years.
He died at West Townsend, Vermont, on October 22, 1897, at seventy-six, while visiting friends, and was buried in Orleans, the Cape Cod village where he was born. The town of Doane in Nebraska still stands. Doane University still stands. The bore he aligned to within 9/16 of an inch still carries freight trains every day under the Berkshires.
Herman Haupt’s name appears on the bronze plaque inside the old central shaft head house at the top of the range as the first chief engineer of the bore. The man who started the work outlived everyone who said it could not be done. The Hoosac Tunnel is still in service. The same bore the engineers finished in 1875 carries freight under the Berkshires every day, now run by Pan Am Southern.
The granite has not moved. The closing error has not changed. The men who built it are not coming back, but the work they did is still standing. On the green in the town of Florida, the marker stone carries the names of those who died, and anyone who walks the green can read them.
On the side of the range, the stone bases of Doane’s six survey towers are still there in the woods, in a perfectly straight line across the top of the mountain, exactly where his notebook said they had to be. The towers are long gone, taken down once the bore was finished, but the work of the men who built it remains, under the mountain, every shift, every train, every season.
