Page 10 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

A few weeks later, he and the other directors of the SVRR appointed a “Committee
on Construction” to find a terminus for that line with the N&W somewhere in the
vicinity of Bonsack, Virginia. Although the firm appointed its railroad engineer,
Frederick Kimball, president of the SVRR and vice president of the N&W, and created
a board of directors for the N&W that overlapped the board of the SVRR, the Clark
Company maintained each of its lines as distinct corporations. The N&W’s new
managers expected it to continue hauling agricultural products, but proposed adding
spur routes from the road into Southwest Virginia’s coal beds as a way to boost
business.

The general location of the coal that Clark & Company anticipated hauling had been
widely known for over a century, and from the 1840s onward, natives and outsiders
alike knew the only hindrance to harvesting the minerals was gathering enough
capital to construct a rail line into the Highlands. Since the early 1870s, and in the
years that the SVRR project had stalled, the coal belt had received even more
attention. Indeed, a large audience was reading about the area’s potential in former
Confederate Major Jedediah Hotchkiss’s journal The Virginias: A Mining, Scientific,
and Industrial Journal Devoted to the Development of Virginia and West Virginia,
and specifically in Charles R. Boyd’s Resources of South-West Virginia, showing
the Mineral Deposits of Iron, Coal, Zinc.

Here is where the story gets really interesting. Boyd was a civil and mining engineer
from Wytheville, Virginia, and he believed his work would “show up our resources in
a proper manner; thus bringing in many men of capital to willingly help us not only
bear our burdens, but create new facilities for making money.”

Frederick Kimball, who had already read mineral surveys commissioned by the
former owners of the SVRR, purchased a hundred copies of Boyd’s book. Access to
the coalfields, he realized, would not only provide the coke necessary to fire iron
furnaces in Virginia, it would also give the N&W and SVRR a cheap source of fuel as
well as a valuable cargo to ship North. If only he could, with the resources of Boyd’s
research, locate these fields he might be on to something. At the time, because of the
inaccessibility of the territory, much of the land was neither under contract or priced
well below market value.

The next installment involves the otherwise unsung heroines of Powhatan’s princess,
Mrs Frederick Kimball and a very astute decision of Mr. Clarence Clark.