Voices from the Blue Ridge Tunnel

After a break during the holiday season, the Society’s exciting educational interactive exhibit “Voices from the Blue Ridge Tunnel: When Men were Machines” is back in full force and will remain open until early November. The free exhibit can be seen in the History Gallery of the R.R. Smith Center for History and Art on Tues-Thurs 1-4, Fri-Sat 10-4, Sun 10-2. 

ACHS’s inspiring educational interactive exhibit shines a light on the compelling human story behind the Blue Ridge Tunnel construction – the historic railroad tunnel 700 feet under Afton Mountain. The tunnel that opened in 1858 for trains and reopened in 2021 (after two decades of cooperative restoration work) to walkers and bicyclists, was designed by French engineer Claudius Crozet, but it and the railroad were built by several thousand Irish immigrants and enslaved African Americans whose blood, sweat, and lives (at least 14 Irishmen and 3 slaves died during construction) turned Crozet’s idea into one of the greatest engineering feats in the world at that time. This exhibit is their story.

Using hand drills, picks, shovels, hammers, gunpowder and fuses, they opened up the mountain inch by inch, laid tracks, and otherwise worked to bring America’s newest transportation sensation—the railroad—into the southern Shenandoah Valley.