Who started the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway?
Chesapeake and Ohio Railway
The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (reporting marks C&O, CO) was a Class I railroad formed in 1869 in Virginia from several smaller Virginia railroads begun in the 19th century. Led by industrialist Collis P. Huntington, it reached from Virginia's capital city of Richmond to the Ohio River by 1873, where the railroad town (and later city) of Huntington, West Virginia was named for him.
Chesapeake and Ohio Railway
Typical of the men who built the C & O during this period was William Nelson Page, a civil engineer who had attended special courses in engineering at the University of Virginia before he went to work on the railroad. Page directed the location and construction of the New River Canyon Bridge in 1871 and 1872, and of the Mill Creek Canyon bridge in 1874. In 1875 and 1876, he led the surveying party charged with mapping out the route of the double-track railway to extend between Hampton Roads and the Ohio River via the New River and Kanawha Valleys of West Virginia. Like many men who came to West Virginia with the railroad, Page was struck with both the beauty and potential of the natural resources and is considered one of the more energetic and successful men who helped develop West Virginia's rich bituminous coal fields in the late 19th and early 20th century. Page and his wife Emma Hayden Gilham, settled in the tiny mountain hamlet of Ansted, West Virginia, a town located in Fayette County which was named for British geologist David T. Ansted, who had mapped much of the region's coal resources in 1853. The palatial Page Mansion was built on a high bluff overlooking the New River far below, where the C&O occupied both sides of the narrow valley. Between the bridge just below Sewell and the one at Hawks Nest, one track is on the west bank of the New River, and the other on the east bank.[5]