Smoke filled the sky over Gauley Bridge on July 26, 1861, as Confederate Gen. Henry B. Wise's soldiers torched the Kanawha River bridge that stood on the piers directly in front of you. That destruction, however, did not prevent Union Gen. Jacob Cox and his 3,000 men from capturing the eastern gateway to the Kanawha Valley a few days later. Cox's men constructed a wire suspension bridge by early 1862, and Union forces occupied the area until September, when Confederate Gen. William W. Loring drove out the Union garrison. Loring destroyed the second bridge on September 11. The Confederates soon abandoned the Kanawha Valley, however, and it remained in Union hands until the end of the war. The Chesapeake & Ohio Railway, constructed between 1869 and 1873 along the New and Kanawha rivers, helped open the Southern West Virginia coalfields to mining. Formerly enslaved Blacks found work opportunities to build new lives, and ex-Confederate Jedidiah Hotchkiss wrote in 1873 that the road was built almost entirely by the labor of negroes, whom he called admirable and trustworthy workmen, sober, equal to the severest toil, and winning the good opinion of everyone.