At the close of the eighteenth century, Virginia stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ohio River, with the coastal plain, Piedmont, Blue Ridge Mountains, and Alleghany Mountains between, and Virginians long struggled to move goods and people across that span. Pioneers followed the James and other rivers westward, establishing settlements while relying on wagons, canoes, or bateaux. George Washington saw the importance of connecting Virginia's tidewater with the Ohio River, and in 1785 the General Assembly chartered the James River Company to build a canal around the Falls of the James in Richmond and eventually link Richmond with the Ohio by canal, though little progress was made on that larger goal. In 1812, a commission led by Chief Justice John Marshall explored Virginia's rivers and strongly endorsed continuing the James River Canal westward. In 1835, under Joseph Carrington Cabell, the James River and Kanawha Canal Company was chartered as successor to the James River Company and became Virginia's great internal improvement enterprise for decades. As railroads gained primacy, the Blue Ridge Mountains remained a major obstacle, so in 1849 Virginia's Board of Public Works incorporated the Blue Ridge Railroad Company to build a line near Mechum's River in Albemarle County through the northern tip of Nelson County on the east side of Rockfish Gap and down the west side to Waynesboro in Augusta County, a route of almost seventeen miles with four tunnels. The privately owned Virginia Central Railroad took control when the line was finished in 1858 and continued building west until the Civil War. Virginia and West Virginia finally connected the tidewaters of the Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio River in 1873, the same decade in which the James River and Kanawha Canal ceased operation.