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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Walking Virginia's Blue Ridge Tunnel |
| 2023-08-01 |
| [G&G] Typically, a mid-summer hike in Central Virginia is not an experience that cools one down. Unless that hike incorporates the Blue Ridge Tunnel, a nearly mile-long, 165-year-old passage through Afton Mountain, situated between the nearby towns of Waynesboro and Charlottesville. During the railroad boom of the mid-nineteenth century, the tunnel was a means to traverse the mountain gap that divides the state’s Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley regions, ultimately linking Richmond to the Ohio River. The Herculean task of building it fell to Claudius Crozet, a French immigrant who served in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia before becoming an engineering professor at West Point and chief engineer for the state of Virginia. Blasting with black gunpowder began in 1850 and was forecast to be completed in three years. The rock, however—especially the greenstone on the tunnel’s east side—had other ideas, its unexpected density causing delay after delay. (Crozet referred to hard rock ninety times in letters to government officials.) |
| Posted by:Besoeker |