Hundreds of Irish immigrants who worked on the Blue Ridge Railroad lived in Augusta County, many in rented houses or shanties lining both sides of the Rockfish Gap Turnpike from Waynesboro up to the Blue Ridge Tunnel, while west side contractors also used slave labor, though the locations of enslaved men's dwellings are unknown. An arched culvert on the west side still carries rainwater down the slope, and its keystone bears Masonic symbols of a T-square and compass without the customary American "G," suggesting that a master European stonemason, in this case an Irish man, carved it. The arched west side portal of the Blue Ridge Tunnel was most probably cut, dressed, and installed by expert Irish stonemasons using locally quarried stone in 1851, following Claudius Crozet's precise instructions for stones "two-feet wide on the face" and "of the best available quality, with chamfered edges." Remnants of a viaduct on the old track mark where the railroad once passed over the turnpike; a handwritten payroll shows that the contractor mostly hired Irish men, including stonemasons, to build it in 1850, and it was destroyed when the state altered the turnpike and renamed it Highway 250 in 1935. Mountain Top Inn once stood at the western crest of Rockfish Gap, where Claudius Crozet, chief engineer for the Blue Ridge Railroad, often boarded while surveying the future route in 1849; the inn burned in 1902, and construction of Interstate 64 in the early 1970s obliterated its ruins.

Photo: Riley Jacob Robert Borton

Photo: Riley Jacob Robert Borton

Photo: Riley Jacob Robert Borton

Afton, Virginia · USA