A partly cloudy day, late March, unseasonably warm. Two men look up as I step into a small clearing in the woods beyond the coal tower.
“Hope I’m not bothering you.”
“It’s cool,” one of them says. He moves over on the makeshift bench so I have room to sit down.
“I saw you taking pictures,” he says. “You know two kids were killed here?”
I know, and that’s part of the reason I’m there. But only part of it.
Surviving structures from the age of the steam locomotive are increasingly rare. They’ve been torn down for safety reasons or because they’re standing in the way of progress.
Six coaling towers, as the railroad called them, remain in Virginia and two of them, in Lynchburg and in Clifton Forge, are still in use. The rest, like the one that stands between East Market Street and the railroad tracks, are relics, analog structures in a digital world.
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The railroads rose and fell, and the view from the tower changed from a landscape of ash and steel to one of corporate offices, condominium complexes, and parking lots. The coal tower has seen our city come of age; it’s been a muse to street kids, artists, and developers; and every now and then it has stood silent witness to the human desperation laid at its feet.
I know this guy named Lucky. He’s a friend of a friend, short, with black hair going gray, and basically homeless. Many times on dark nights in Belmont when the stars were spinning and we’d all pushed it a little too far over the line, he would start to rage about the coal tower. “That thing’s evil,” he’d say. “They should just tear it down.”
Should we? Tear it down, I mean? Or would we be losing something we can never get back?
Railroad town
High up on the hard, gray body of the tower there’s graffiti that reads, “Out of Site [sic], Out of Mind.” After the C&O train station on Water Street shut down, it was possible to live in Charlottesville your whole life and never know the coal tower existed. But there was a time when it was at the center of everything. When the C&O freight yard finally closed in 1986, Fred Compston, the last trainmaster to run the yard, addressed the Charlottesville City Council.
“I remember as a kid growing up in Kentucky along the Ohio River,” he said. “And if you stood on top of a hill, you could see the coal train with the steam engine spouting white smoke. It was beautiful.”
In many ways the railroad made our city. The first train pulled into Charlottesville on June 27, 1850, arriving at the newly built station at the east end of town. It was, I assume, moving some sort of cargo. Corn, maybe, or tobacco. Albemarle County was the biggest corn producer in Virginia at the time, and in 1850 the county grew 1.5 million pounds of tobacco. Or maybe it was carrying coal. The second commercial railroad in the country was in Virginia, built to shuttle coal from the mines near Richmond to the factories along the James River. Corn, coal, and cigarettes. American as red, white, and blue.
The Louisa Railroad was started in 1836, its tracks laid westward from the town of Doswell, hitting Louisa in 1838 and reaching Gordonsville in 1840. The route was supposed to proceed northwest to Harrisonburg and then across the Blue Ridge Mountains at Swift Run Gap, but that plan was deemed too expensive. So the tracks were re-routed through Charlottesville, crossing the mountains near Afton via Claudius Crozet’s famed Blue Ridge Tunnel, built by Irish workers who earned $1.25 a day to dig through a mile of solid granite using only picks, hand drills, and black powder. By the time the tracks rea
ched Charlottesville in 1850, the line’s name had changed to the Virginia Central Railroad.Huddled on the banks of the mighty James, the town of Scottsville had long been Albemarle County’s transportation hub. The James River and Kanawha Canal, begun in 1785, was Scottsville’s big bid for transportation supremacy, but it was only half finished by 1851, and the railroad was in ascension. After the Civil War, Scottsville and the canal sunk into obscurity. It was suddenly a brand new, steam-and-coal-powered, Charlottesville-centered world.
Prior to 1850, traveling from Richmond to Charlottesville took all day and involved hopping off the train in Taylorsville to hitch a ride the rest of the way on a stagecoach. After 1850, you could take the train the whole way and make it to C’ville in time for lunch. The population of Charlottesville subsequently jumped from 1,890 in 1850 to 2,600 in 1853, and the University of Virginia, which in 1855 got its own train station, saw its enrollment increase by almost 300 students over the next few years.
In 1864, Union General Philip H. Sheridan was sent into Virginia with orders to “[do] all the damage to railroads and crops that you can.…we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” Sheridan’s campaign through the valley was called “The Burning,” and although Charlottesville was basically left alone, Sheridan did drop in and burn down the train station.
When the war ended, the station was rebuilt, and by 1870, Charlottesville was the busiest stop on what was now called The Chesapeake & Ohio line. In 1905, the wooden station was replaced by a grand, colonial mansion, brick with white columns, signifying the importance of the railroad in a newly powerful America. Thirteen trains a day were running through town by the 1920s. The Charlottesville freight yard was crowded, busy and big, covering the entire area between East Market Street, Carlton Road, and the end of the Downtown Mall. There was a semi-circular building called a roundhouse where the trains were serviced, a sand tower, a water tank, several wooden tool houses, an inspection pit, and a 115′ wooden turntable where engines could be turned around and sent back down one of the many tracks reaching out like fingers.
The first steam locomotives ran on wood, a few on oil, but after the Civil War, coal became the railroad’s dominant energy source. So you needed coal and you needed a way to get it into the trains. At first, stations relied on a pile of coal and men with shovels, but by the end of the 19th century, most train depots had elaborate towers to house and dispense coal to the waiting trains. Early towers were made of wood, later towers steel or concrete. By the 1940s, some stations had towers that stood hundreds of feet high and spanned multiple tracks. The Charlottesville station had a wooden coaling tower originally, until in 1942 the Ogle Construction Company built a 91′-tall, concrete bullet capable of holding 300 tons of coal.
Even as they hit their peak, the writing was on the wall for steam-powered trains. As early as 1910 they began to be replaced by cleaner, easier to use diesel trains; by the ’50s the demise of the steam locomotive was basically a fait accompli. Railroad traffic declined through the 1960s and ’70s. In 1979, Amtrak moved its operations to Union Station on Main Street, and three years later, commercial trains ceased stopping at the Charlottesville C&O station altogether. In 1986, after 136 years of service, the station was shut down despite protests from local members of the National Railway Historical Society, who’d been running nostalgia trips through the station since 1964. The turntable and most of the yard were destroyed the following year, leaving the tower standing alone beside a significantly smaller number of tracks, while the station, converted into offices, sits across from the Transit Center, facing its replacement.
