In 1849, a Frenchman nearly sixty years old stood at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and agreed to do something no one in America had ever attempted. He would bore a railroad tunnel more than 4,200 feet straight through the heart of a mountain of solid rock, by hand, with no machine of any kind, at a time before dynamite had even been invented. When it was finished, it would be the longest railroad tunnel in the United States. His name was Claudius Crozet, and before he ever saw that mountain, he had been an artillery officer in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Crozet was born in France in the last year of the 1700s and trained as an artillery officer and military engineer. He served under Napoleon himself, marching into Russia with the Grand Army in 1812. At the great and terrible Battle of Borodino, he was taken prisoner by the Russians. He survived his captivity, was released, and returned to the French Army.
When Napoleon fell for the last time and the empire collapsed, Crozet did what many talented men of a defeated cause have done: he left the old world for the new. He emigrated to the United States in 1816, bringing with him something America badly needed. He was one of the finest mathematical and engineering minds of his age, trained in the rigorous French schools that were then the best in the world. Hired to teach at the United States Military Academy at West Point, he introduced a level of advanced mathematics and engineering the young academy had never seen, teaching the men who would go on to build much of the country and to fight its civil war.
He helped found the Virginia Military Institute and surveyed the wild interior of Virginia so thoroughly that men called him the Pathfinder of the Blue Ridge. Virginia was desperate to cross those mountains. To the north, New York had its canal and its railroads carrying the trade of the West to the sea. Virginia was being left behind, cut off from the growing Ohio Valley by the long wall of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies beyond it.
If Virginia could not get a railroad over the mountains, its ports would wither and its rivals would take the future. Virginia had tried other ways to reach the West. It had built a great canal up the James River hoping to float the trade of the Ohio Valley down to Richmond, but a canal cannot climb a mountain, and the Blue Ridge stopped it. Meanwhile, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was driving hard for the West, threatening to capture the commerce Virginia meant for itself.
So, in 1849, the state chartered the Blue Ridge Railroad and named Claudius Crozet its chief engineer. The Blue Ridge at the place called Rockfish Gap is a hard, high barrier, and Crozet’s solution was bold. He would carry the railroad across it with a series of four tunnels bored through the ridge. The westernmost, and by far the greatest of them, would pierce the very crest of the mountain.
That great tunnel, the Blue Ridge Tunnel, would run more than 4,200 feet through the rock. Some records say 4,273 feet and some a little less, but by any measure it was, when finished, the longest railroad tunnel in the United States and one of the longest in the world. Picture what that actually meant to build in the 1850s. There were no tunnel boring machines, no pneumatic drills, no dynamite.
There was only rock, and men with hand tools and black powder. To advance the tunnel, a man would hold a long steel drill against the rock face while others swung heavy sledgehammers to strike it, turning the drill a little after each blow, hammering a hole into the solid stone by main force. It was called hand drilling, and it was as slow and brutal as it sounds. Into each finished hole they packed black powder, tamped it, ran a fuse, and blasted a little more of the mountain loose.
Then men and boys shoveled the shattered rock into carts by hand and hauled it out, and the whole grinding cycle began again. Some days, through the hardest rock, the two faces of the tunnel advanced only a few inches. Each part of that drilling was done by the strength and skill of men in a rhythm as old as mining itself. One man, the shaker, crouched and held the drill against the rock, giving it a small turn between every blow, while others swung long-handled sledgehammers down onto the head of the steel again and again, hour upon hour.
In that hard greenstone, drills went dull constantly and were carried out to blacksmiths who reforged and sharpened the steel in glowing forges, so that a small army of smiths worked day and night just to keep the drills biting into the mountain. They drove the tunnel from both ends at once, eastern and western. Separate crews began boring toward each other, aiming to meet somewhere deep in the middle, thousands of feet in and hundreds of feet below the crest, working for years toward a point they could not see. Inside, the conditions were a particular kind of hell.
The only light was candle and oil lamp. There was no ventilation to speak of, so the smoke of the black powder and the lamps and the dust of the drilling hung in the dead air, and the men breathed it shift after shift. Water seeped and dripped and sometimes flooded. The rock fell without warning.
Day after day, year after year, the men went into that darkness. Most of those men were Irish. The railroad recruited its labor from among the Irish immigrants pouring into America by the hundreds of thousands, driven out of Ireland by the Great Famine. They came to the Blue Ridge with nothing and took the most dangerous work in America, drilling and blasting inside a mountain.
They lived in rough shanty camps on the mountainside with their wives and children. About 800 Irish men worked on the Blue Ridge tunnel and the line around it, living and dying on that mountain. Alongside the Irish worked about 40 enslaved African-American men, and their situation was different in every way. They were not paid for their labor.
They were hired out to the railroad by the men who legally owned them, who collected the wages for the work these men were forced to do. They were housed separately from the Irish, apart from the shanty camps. They had no freedom to leave the work and no share in whatever it earned. In the slave states, hiring out was a common way for slaveholders to turn the people they owned into a steady stream of income.
So the enslaved men on the Blue Ridge were, in the eyes of the law, a rented asset sent to do the most dangerous work in America so that other men could pocket their pay. They drilled the same rock and breathed the same poisoned air as the Irish beside them, and then went at night not to their own families but to separate quarters under watch, with nothing of their own to show for the mountain they were helping to move. In 1854, death came to the mountain in a form worse than any rockfall. Cholera broke out.
Cholera is a savage disease spread through fouled water, and it can kill a healthy person in a matter of hours. In the crowded, filthy conditions of the shanty camps, it ran through the Irish like fire. Men who had gone into the tunnel healthy in the morning were dead by nightfall. It killed the workers, and because their families lived with them on the mountain, it killed their wives and children, too.
About 33 Irish men, women, and children living in the shanties near the tunnel are recorded to have died in that single epidemic, and the true number was very likely higher. The enslaved men, by and large, did not catch the cholera. They were housed separately, away from the worst of the contagion, and the men who owned them, hearing of the epidemic, pulled them away from the tunnel and out of danger. Not out of mercy, but because an enslaved man was valuable property, a financial investment they did not wish to lose to disease.
The Irish, who were free men, were left to face the cholera. The enslaved, who were not free at all, were withdrawn precisely because their owners had money at stake in keeping them alive. At least three of the enslaved men did die on the railroad, killed in runaway railcar and handcar accidents. The most commonly cited figure is that at least 189 people are recorded to have died during the construction of the Blue Ridge Railroad.
That number is a count for the whole railroad project, not the great tunnel alone. It includes men, women, and children, and it is dominated not by dramatic cave-ins but by disease, above all the cholera epidemic of 1854. It is almost certainly an undercount, because the record keeping of the age did not trouble to track every immigrant laborer or enslaved man who died on a mountain in Virginia. While the great bore crept forward, Crozet did something audacious.
He laid a temporary track up and over the top of the Blue Ridge, a steep and twisting line that climbed the outside of the mountain so trains could cross the ridge and the railroad could open for business years before the tunnel beneath was done. For a time, trains labored up and over the mountain on one of the steepest railroad grades in the country, while below them in the dark, the Irish and the enslaved drilled steadily toward the day the trains could go straight through. After years of labor, the two crews boring from opposite ends met in the darkness deep inside the mountain. Two tunnels driven for years from opposite sides of a mountain through solid rock, guided by nothing but hand surveying and the calculations of the man in charge, had to meet.
They met deep in the Blue Ridge with only the slightest error, the two bores lining up so nearly true that it stands as one of the great feats of surveying in American history. The Frenchman who had learned his mathematics in the schools of Napoleon had aimed a tunnel through a mountain from both ends and hit his mark in the dark. The Blue Ridge Tunnel opened to trains on the 13th of April, 1858. It had taken the better part of a decade.
It was, on that day, the longest railroad tunnel in the United States, a hole more than 4,200 feet long, driven through the solid crest of a mountain entirely by the muscle of men with hand drills and black powder. Claudius Crozet lived to see it open, and he died a few years later, in 1864, in the middle of the Civil War that so many of his West Point students were fighting on both sides. The tunnel he had built to carry the peaceful commerce of a growing country spent the war years carrying soldiers and supplies instead. The little town that grew up near his great work is called Crozet to this day.
For most of a century, the tunnel did its work. In 1944, in the middle of the Second World War, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway bored a new, larger tunnel right alongside the old one and switched the trains onto it. Crozet’s great tunnel, the longest in America in its day, fell silent. Its ends were closed, and for 76 years it sat dark and abandoned inside the mountain, slowly filling with water and rockfall, remembered by almost no one but a few local historians.
After a long campaign and a decade of careful, difficult restoration work, pumping out the water, shoring up the rock, clearing the debris, and building trails to reach it, the Blue Ridge Tunnel was reopened late in the year 2020. This time not to trains but to people on foot. It is now the centerpiece of a public trail more than two miles long, and the tunnel itself, all 4,200 feet and more of it, is open for anyone to walk straight through from one side of the mountain to the other. You can pass through the same bore the Irish and the enslaved drilled by hand and put your own hand on the rock and see, still there in the stone, the marks left by the hand drills.
There are graves near the tunnel, the graves of the cholera dead, Irish men, women, and children who came across an ocean to escape a famine and found their end inside a Virginia mountain. The mountain has not changed. The rock is the same rock.
The only real difference is that you can walk out the far side in a few minutes, and they could not, not for years.
