The Tunnel

[Music] in 1850 a work crew 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 stand at rockfish gap in the blue ridge mountains in front of you to the east is the piedmont region of virginia 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 in the heart of the mountains it has been waiting nearly 80 years to be discovered this is the story of the creation and the recreation of the blue ridge tunnel you walk up to that it's it's just like a dream almost you're walking through you've gone through this brush you'd cross tracks and then all of a sudden you see this opening on the east side the bare raw rock i don't know the west so often you come through and it's misty and it's misty inside the tunnel and it's it's just beautiful and the history of the irish workers that came to this country they were really the back on the workforce that did the most difficult and most dangerous and most poorly paid work they were just desperate people desperate to make a living to survive to recognize their contribution is another important aspect 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 this is the plans for blue ridge tunnel rehabilitation and trail project the picture of the whole project basically phase one starts here at afton depot and then it follows the original alignment of the railroad 3 400 feet to the entrance to the tunnel on the east phase two is the rehabilitation of the tunnel four thousand two hundred feet of the tunnel itself and then phase three would be a trail all the way up to there which is connects to route 250. in 2014 nelson county presented the project to engineering companies interested in bidding on the contract for restoration of the tunnel and i'm kirsten tinch i'm the engineer of record for the project sealed bids will be received at nelson county administrator's office 84 courthouse square the bids must be accompanied by a certified check cash or acceptable bid bond amount of five percent of the base bid for all bids over a hundred thousand dollars can you make reference in the plans to a geotechnical report is that available to us i'm sure the east portal is unlined up to that first bulkhead the other major work at the portal is the power pit wall above it water is coming down and coming over the face okay all right thank you we're going to be visiting the tunnel here later i will tell you that i first walked into the east portal i wore some boots it just came to my knees but the water went 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 tunnel's eastern portal is more than half a mile and will require the construction of a gravel path and safety fencing during 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 there is considerable work to be done to control the flow of water that seeps in through the mountain but an even bigger challenge will be the removal of two massive 12-foot thick concrete bulkheads they were installed in the 1950s to create a large chamber for the storage of propane unfortunately the propane seeped out about as easily as the water seeps in after several companies reviewed the project fce fielder's choice enterprises was awarded the contract to me clearly it's a treasure it is a historical treasure that most people don't really know much about and you can talk endlessly about what a great thing it is but you've got to go to it and walk in that tunnel to see it my family is all irish all the way back to the oil country my father was an o'brien and my mom was a with a dog or tea i've been back and forth to ireland several times i did a piece on araglen which is a famine village an air glen has stacks of rocks which used to be buildings and now it's just sinking into the bog one day they just got up and left you can't eat grass forever and well being irish in the united states at that time was not a proud thing i mean the signs on the bars would say no irishmen or dogs allowed in the bar and they were a rowdy bunch and there's probably some justification for that but they came from hard scrabble places and hard scrabble lives i mean this was dangerous work a lot of these guys were a lot of pain all the time cold dreary nasty ear drums gone from blasting maybe hands being severed it's just pretty nasty work and so here they are building mr crosa's tunnel for a dollar a day the first image that i had of this tunnel was this and it was just so powerful so many layers of mythology that could be ascribed to it and this this is just sifted dirt that's mixed with acrylic medium and then painted onto the paper this color is from the brick and you can see that the color is exactly the brick color because it is the brick and that's that's dirt a photograph is not real it's a piece of paper and this is real this is of for and by the place it's kind of like the dna of the site for most of the semester we spent this course speaking about the tunnel and and preservation issues and learning from klonmoor's research and we kind of fell in love with the tunnel a little bit i wanted to understand why the connection at rockfish gap was so critical another thing that was compelling to 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 the blue ridge parkway at afton mountain the appalachian trail stretching from maine to georgia and the 1960s interstate 64. 700 feet below that is the blue ridge tunnel the biggest picture was understanding the cultural landscape of the site that included getting sort of into the lives of these irish workers and so i created this map to try to put into context how many immigrants were coming to the united states between 1841 and 1860. it's obvious here that most of the immigrants coming during that time were coming from ireland during the time where they are experiencing such hardships to understand a little bit more of the hardships that they faced in the potato famine and where they were coming from helps understand how they could possibly endure the circumstances and loss of life during the making of this tunnel [Music] gentlemen who work in the tunnels they're tunnel rats rats in the sewer ranch well that's what you are in a tunnel you're in a confined area and you better be a special individual to tolerate that the boys would work with their dad in the tunnel they would hold a star drill and turn it as their dad was hammering the star drill in in order to make a hole big enough to put the dynamite in the black powder i should say not dynamite black powder we did not have dynamite at that period of time so they used black powder which was very temperamental we might say so there was a lot of boys that might have lost a finger a hand an arm whatever it may be so there was a little irish boy standing up there and his dad was pounding the star drill and he was turning it and they got down to here and they said okay that's enough and they put black powder in the hole and a fuse on it boom there it come out i know the first time i walked in here i got goosebumps and i've been in many tunnels but this just all inspired me when i walked in here because it just it's phenomenal and it needs to be preserved it needs to be taken care of you think back to 1850 and the technology they had it's quite an engineering feat there's just no way to describe it other than that it was just it was marvelous [Music] the nelson county board of supervisors had committed to the restoration of the tunnel in 2001 but it was 2014 before the company fce started work clearing the path to the eastern portal one year later alan hale reviewed the project with nelson county staff and with engineers from fce and from vdot the virginia department of transportation a fence separating the active line from this trail eight foot high chain link fence csx wanted a couple more feet on it that's what we did originally we were going to bring this much uh closer to grade but we've modified the plans so that it's still wheelchair accessible but it'll go down and back up it appears to be just sitting there there's like two of them one little one let's see what getting that down was you can't get up you can't bench it because you got rocks we got a 350 with a 10 000 pound hammer we'll bench up to get to it and grab a tat tat and dig a hole here for it to fall into to divert seepage above the portal face to the rock slopes along the sides of the port so that's that's the whole idea is they're going to build something up there and drainage is going to come down now is it dry does it go in here is it still pulled up behind here i thought i got all the water drained out that i could get drained but it's like two fire hoses in there just coming outside the rock i can't do nothing with that i can't stop it that's why we're walking in there to see what's still in there in the 19th century 215 000 miles of railroad track were laid in the united states five times the length of today's interstate system in virginia several different companies were laying track on both sides of the blue ridge the privately owned company the virginia central railroad was working its way in this direction from richmond and was actually working on the other side of the mountain in waynesboro heading towards stanton and further west but didn't want to take on the really risky business of getting through the mountains with the tunnels the really heavy heavy work that had to be done so richmond legislator decided to take it on they hired claudius crozet as the chief engineer for the blue ridge railroad a 17-mile stretch from the meacham's river near what is now the town of crozet and he had to slowly climb along the eastern side of the mountains there he built three other tunnels the first tunnel was near the village of greenwood and it was actually the first tunnel completed it too was brick arched all the way through as you work your way along the side of the mountain he came to another area that was called the brooksville hill one of the more difficult tunnels the rock and the stone kept slipping falling down on top of the irish workers below and then just before they got to what is today the town of afton was then called and still called today the little rock tunnels it's only 100 feet long and then it slowly climbs the rest of the way and it turns and penetrates through the mountain and comes out in the great shenandoah valley and then on down to the south river in waynesboro that was the 17-mile stretch that claudius crossed was in charge of claudius crozet was born in france served as an engineer under napoleon immigrated to america taught math at west point and served as the first president of the virginia military institute educated at the ecole polytechnic and that was the start of the time when they switched to a military system and that influenced everything he did the rest of his life and he used that later at west point and then later as one of the founding fathers of vmi and that's one of the ways best to describe him extremely disciplined you would love to have him working for you you may not like to work for him quite as well crozet's great achievement was the design and construction of the blue ridge tunnel nearly a mile in length the design of the tunnel was his own adaption instead of a roman arch he chose the ellipse as a cost savings means to excavate less of a cross section the rock was extremely difficult and it took quite a bit of time with the technology they had at the time they worked in terms of feet per month maybe 19 20 feet drive per month for advancing the face that's very slow again that's why it took eight years to complete the longest tunnel in north america at that time it was a notable achievement and it remains the longest tunnel driven by hand drilling and black powder explosives the american society of civil engineers named this a national historic engineering landmark they operated in a heading bench method so they had a smaller tunnel near the crown which is the area up the ceiling we'd refer to it and they drilled horizontally there into the face that left a bench behind the rest of the tunnel they could drill vertically in it's easier to drill vertically than horizontally on the east side you have the raw rough rock because this stone was so hard it didn't need any support whereas on this side he'd start blasting in and the rock and the earth above started caving in so they had to spend time and effort of building timbering and then behind the timbering would be the brick masons coming and so this end of the tunnel is all brick arched it's lined with brick because of instability of the rock and that's one of our major challenges in converting this from an industrial project a railroad tunnel to a civilian rails to trails project so that's part of the next phase of repair renovation and making the tunnels safer it's just a wonderful experience to bring people for the first time into the tunnel and what i've always noticed is there's a lot of laughter and fun and excitement as we start in and then it gets very quiet the whole group becomes very quiet as they walk further and further into the tunnel it gets darker and darker and it's there's just something that takes over you and you feel kind of an eerie sense the irish would come in here and then they blasted the rock and then loaded it up onto carts and brought all the rock out through the tunnel one thing you might look at while you're standing here are the bricks that go up the sides and over your head so we've now if you're an irishman working here not only did you lay that brick you did it six times and then look up and think about laying brick over your head you're on scaffolding and you have to work over your head how long did it take irish to build this home it took them a full eight years to blast through the mountainside to make this tunnel do you know how many people worked on the tunnel there was a crew of about a hundred and some on this side hundred some 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 the cholera came through in a 1854 it killed 40 of the irishmen that were working on both sides of the tunnel yes dear what's colorado cholera was a disease that we know a lot about now but back then it was a disease that they were afraid of so do they sleep here overnight they had to sleep here yeah in the shanties they would do their work for 8-10 hours and then go back out to the shanty our guess is that those shanties were clustered together maybe 10 or 12 of them and we do have some journals that state that some people who had walked by were able to you know solve the little village of shanties and what the lifestyle was sort of like earlier you guys mentioned people digging some archaeologists um what have what have they found so far didn't find a whole lot but bits and pieces part of a china doll and what archaeology often looks for is trash things that were thrown out they were broken and they couldn't be repaired we're hoping to find where the shanties were on the side of the mountain the only thing that tells us people were here are these platforms this is not natural none of these platforms occurred based on erosion or anything and historically that would be the irish laborers and the railroad is right down below us finding things that don't fit the local pattern they fit the time period but not what people were doing here and the only thing that happens out of the ordinary at that time are hundreds of irish immigrants flooding this very sort of tight space they're not the biggest but that's actually a white clay tobacco pipe for what they call cuddies short stemmed clay tobacco so they can keep it in their teeth while they're working and it was an easy way to tuck it in their pocket the tops of their hats and you look at pictures of the 19th century you'll always see a clay cuddy where in ireland they call them dudin that become part of the entire stereotype of the patty we look at these objects not simply you know they smoke so what there's we look at the deeper meaning of it in irish tradition it was a very social thing it was people reaffirming very tight bonds and it becomes poignant out here on a mountainside and that would be what we see through these artifacts is piecing together that that culture or how they transform that culture to fit it into this sort of strange landscape for them in 2015 the trail on the eastern side of the tunnel was completed and alan hale walked it with members of the blue ridge tunnel foundation a group formed to build local and regional support for the project but that marked only the end of phase one three years later in 2018 work began on phase two the rehabilitation of the tunnel itself including the removal of the 12-foot thick bulkheads [Music] that day backing out of the tunnel something new appeared in the distance almost a mile away a dot of daylight shining through the blue ridge mountains it was an echo of another great day in the history of the tunnel december 29 1856 claudius crozet was able to get both crews to actually meet in the middle so they were finally able to report that daylight now shines through the blue ridge mountains and what was amazing of course was how close they were to each other we have seen in writing that anywhere from an inch to six inches from center line to center line the both sides met dennis shanahan the story goes that his son was passed through from one crew to the next so a little baby was the first one to actually make it through the tunnel a newspaperman wrote that day that there was great celebration and drinking and the next three words were hooray hooray hooray this had been reported for so long they're not through yet they're not done yet they're you know will they make it crozet doesn't know what he's doing he got a lot of flack as experienced as he was there were really unexpected troubles he didn't expect landslides because they were unusual east of the allegheny mountains and he certainly didn't expect a cholera epidemic he didn't expect brick makers to make inferior bricks so there were all kinds of things slowing him down mary lyons has examined documents from the blue ridge railroad to write histories of the workers this is a letter from john kelly the contractor hired by claudius crozet to build the blue ridge tunnel kelly had emigrated in 1837 from county cork ireland and many of the later immigrants he hired to labor in the tunnel were also corchians [Music] his letter of march 8 1853 was a plea for compensation for one of those workers michael curran who had lost one of his hands due to a premature explosion of powder inside the tunnel the work demanded of the irish was extremely dangerous in april of 1853 there were cave-ins at the tunnels that killed two irishmen the irish went on strike an average of once a year and in april or did walkouts and in april 53 they went on a three-week strike and actually managed to raise their wages so if you were making a dollar twelve you gotta raise to 125. crozet was humiliated and embarrassed by this and he immediately all of his 1853 letters and early 1854 all about slave labor we've got to in essence he said in his very flowery 19th century way get rid of the irish laborers claudius crozet approached the irish as if he were still in the military they were the privates and he was the general so slave labor seemed to make a lot more sense to him so george faro who was his landlord at brooksville inn said he could get him 40 to 50 able-bodied negro men as he put it renting out of slave labor was just everywhere i mean it was part of the economy that was built on slave labor in the 19th century enslaved workers rented out 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 the enslaved men broke up rock into two inch pieces of ballast and you prepare the track beds they hand built embankments helping to build culverts grubbing and clearing the land james williams was rented out to the railroad at the age of 12. he said they were rented like horses at least 300 enslaved men and boys labored on the blue bridge railroad but until the contract with george faro only the irish had worked inside the tunnel i would estimate 800 irishmen and boys labored in the tunnel 13 died they were either blown up blasting accidental sliding of earth and being crushed by these work cars so george faro insisted that the contract state quote said negro shall not be employed in loading or blasting on said work 33 enslaved men labored in the blue ridge tunnel in 1854 all of them were listed on the payroll record as being floors in other words they removed the rocky debris after blast just a few weeks after the 33 enslaved men began working inside the tunnel claudius crozet reported on an incident that happened on the western slope of the mountain where a small group of enslaved workers were hauling dirt on flat cars which the railroad men called flats brooksville april 29 1854 to the board of public works gentlemen on thursday the six the overseer of the negros told them that they might go on and load the flats while he took his breakfast it appears that the engine man let at once the whole train down the grade some of our negroes and some of our peace misses riding on the flats in checking probably too suddenly the increasing speed of the train the coupling pin next to the engine was broken there being no brake upon any one of the flats they descended the grade with a rapidly increasing velocity the poor fellows would have suddenly been safe but for the unaccountable circumstance of a flat having been left in the curve beyond the winsborough depot standing right in the main track it produced a fearful collision by which two negroes 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 enslaved men hauled rock for the rest of 1854 but the contract with george faro was not renewed for 1855 and enslaved men were never used again inside the tunnel they chose not to continue it they'd had to compensate slaveholders for the deaths of jerry and tom and because of the famine millions of irish were flooding the country and they were dispensable if one man was blown to bits there was another to take his place [Music] as far as the tunnel itself there's blood down in there you know and bits of phone i mean these guys didn't just fall over and have a heart attack they were blown up and that's important to me i see it as a sacred place [Music] and i sometimes think well those guys who were blown up what would they want you know would they want their work to be shown and uh or would they want to say leave my leave my bones alone i don't know the answer on one level is a certain scariness and there's a certain sense of of awe of being in here almost a sense that this is stolen property why are we here right now we didn't build this those who built the tunnel isn't it theirs but i think the fact that we're in here communicates to them somewhere maybe in unmarked graves around here they are saying well i took the yanks long enough to get here but at least they're here now and let's let's put a little pressure on a little psychic pressure on them to document us you know there were hundreds of people in here at one time they would sing songs probably mostly in irish and they would tell stories to keep themselves from getting bored and also to keep away thoughts of what they left in ireland the great hunger they saw people in their counties starving to death they decided well the most life-giving and vital chance is to get on a ship board we've never seen a ship for 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 they do over there and so i think they came with a little bit of dreaminess but they also came from a whole lot of fear because they saw what had been had been happening in their homeland so there would have been not only the noise of the hammers in here and the explosives going off but there would have been snatches of fiddle even in here at the end of the day if the fiddle was struck by reel a hornpipe or whatever he wanted to play a lot of guys and the occasional wife the occasional girlfriend would do some dancing so i think it's safe to say that right here where we're standing right now you could easily have seen people dancing to a fiddler [Music] foreign i do love to to know about the place where i live i think that's important to know where you live and to be able to tell those stories every time i drive over the mountain i hear irish music historic preservation isn't any longer just a house museum or architecture it is stories and more and more people want their stories told stan and his group hadn't done all that research we would never have felt that connection we would never 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 a huge i hadn't thought of it that way but you're right that bothered me that it had been either ignored or forgotten in 2018 work continued on the western end of the tunnel stabilizing the walls and repairing the brickwork for the restoration of the tunnel nelson county received a series of grants from the commonwealth transportation board with vdot the virginia department of transportation providing oversight the grants were federal funds intended for non-traditional transportation projects the budget for the entire project was 5.4 million dollars in 2020 phase 3 the construction of a trail to the western portal was completed and the tunnel and trail were opened to the public 19 years after the project was conceived [Music] it's been a long haul but uh it is it's just fantastic i think to be able to go through this tunnel there's really nothing quite like this in the country i mean in terms of its design its age and the way it's preserved i mean aside from the brick near the portals this is perfectly preserved just as it was when the trains came through in 1858 [Music] knowing what the irish laborers went through is magical to me to know that i'm today walking through what took them so long to build and what they gave their blood sweat and tears to create and i'm really excited that we'll be able to open this tunnel up to the public and more and more of us can enjoy it i know that everybody for the first time will marvel when they go through and i think a lot of them like me will want to come back [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: American Focus Films

Views: 252,592

Rating: 4.8493352 out of 5

Keywords: Ireland, Irish American, historic preservation, Irish music, Virginia tourism, railroad history, Virginia Humanities

Id: IRJGKjT-ahQ

Length: 35min 50sec (2150 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021