Asheville getting back on track!
Railroads were being built across the expanding United States in the early nineteenth century. Western North Carolina was also expanding. Yet Asheville, a crossroads for agriculture, was also becoming an attraction for visitors seeking a healing environment, loggers hoping to harvest lumber, and miners seeking significant mineral discoveries.
All these groups required an easy transportation route to reach Asheville, which is in the Blue Ridge Mountains and railroads offered them the right solution. Up until 1886, no railroad would connect directly to Asheville. In the 1870s, the railway routes reached up until the mountainside at Old Fort, where passengers and products had to transfer to stagecoaches that would carry them further along, or they would ride on the backs of horses and sometimes even walk by foot. Then, at the beginning of 1879, after the expenses of expanding the North Carolina routes with the biggest challenge was the Swannanoa Mountains that rose above a high valley. The railroad reached the Buncombe County (a county classified as a part of Western North Carolina; its county seat is Asheville). The Western North Carolina Railroad arrived at Biltmore for the first time on October 3, 1880. Money, power, and a taste of wealth came in Western North Carolina through trains.
Workers spread to the west of Asheville a year after iron rails arrived in 1880, digging, filling, and blasting a 116-mile extension of the line to Murphy, giving thousands with a conduit to the outside world. As seen in the picture, prison chain gangs were being used as cheap labor supply to construct the Cowee Tunnel.
Col. Franklin Coxe, whose hometown is Asheville was the vice president of the Western North Carolina Railroad. Exerting his authority, Coxe routed the track through Asheville, officially completing the expansion through the mountain city in 1886. 1886, the year that connected Asheville to the rest of America, Asheville began booming. After initiating the tracks in the city, Coxe opened the Battery Park Hotel, which lifted Asheville’s reputation into a city of leisure among the upper class. The hotel, which now stands as the Grove Arcade, introduced the meanings of fine dining and ballroom dancing with orchestra music.
Although the railroad routes to Asheville took time and a tremendous toll on the financial backing because of the rough terrain the tracks had to be set up on, the outcomes of the trains paid back multiples of that. Traditional industries in the region relied primarily on rail to get resources and goods to market, resulting in an explosive expansion in production and commerce between the advent of railways and the early 1900s. Not only that, but people could now travel more freely to further states faster, and people from other states could come as well. The state of North Carolina as a whole and the city of Asheville underwent economic and industrial development.
Bibliography:
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History - Great Smoky Mountains Railroad | Steam Train Rides for Families in North Carolina. (2021, March 25). Retrieved November 16, 2021, from Great Smoky Mountains Railroad | Steam Train Rides for Families in North Carolina website: https://www.gsmr.com/train-history/
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Southern Appalachia: 50 Events That Put Us On The Map. (2015, June). Retrieved November 16, 2021, from Smoky Mountain Living website: https://www.smliv.com/stories/southern-appalachia-50-events-that-put-us-on-the-map/
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Railroads in Western North Carolina - Digital Heritage. (2010, August 30). Retrieved November 16, 2021, from Digital Heritage website: https://digitalheritage.org/2010/08/railroads-in-western-north-carolina/
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Smith, W. (2016, March 23). All Aboard! The Coming of the Railroad into Western North Carolina - The North Carolina Arboretum. Retrieved November 16, 2021, from The North Carolina Arboretum website: https://www.ncarboretum.org/2016/03/23/aboard-coming-railroad-western-north-carolina/