After the Civil War, the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, decided to invest in a railroad to Cumberland Gap and Middlesborough. The first train to travel on that railroad from Knoxville
After the end of the Civil War a railroad was built to haul iron ore from the Cranberry mines in North Carolina down to a foundry in Johnson City, Tennessee.
Building a railroad in Appalachia after the Civil War was always a hard, back-breaking effort. But in the very rugged mountains of Western North Carolina, which contained the tallest mountains