Railroads made large-scale logging possible in western North Carolina after a rail line was built there in the 1880s, and lumber companies including Blackwood Lumber were established in Jackson County. In 1922, Blackwood built its own spur line, the Tuckaseegee and Southeastern Railroad (T&SE), with 12.5 miles of track running from Sylva to East LaPorte along what is now the Jackson County Greenway. Because full-sized locomotives could not handle the steep slopes and sharp curves, Blackwood and other companies built narrow-gauge tracks to connect logging operations to the main rail lines, and Shay engines hauled timber cars; Blackwood employee Felix Hooper remembered 28 cars being pulled down Caney Fork. The T&SE ran 8 hours a day, 5 days a week between Sylva and East LaPorte, and because it was chartered as a railroad it was required to provide passenger service, including rides for students going to Cullowhee to attend school, with a roundtrip ticket costing 50 cents. Blackwood Lumber employed 100 men in the mill and another 100 to cut logs, and families lived in company-built houses above Highway 107 near company facilities that included a train depot, boarding house, post office, commissary, offices, and later a church, school, and clubhouse. Western North Carolina held the last great stands of virgin forest in the eastern U.S., but logging stripped thousands of acres of trees and caused erosion, flooding, destruction of waterways, loss of habitat, and, through methods such as splash dams, torrents that obliterated everything in their path.