mountain-sheltered, and crossed by the winding Cumberland; here and
there cottages of a smart modern air already built or building; in
another direction, business blocks of brick and stone, graded streets
and avenues and macadamized roads; and elsewhere, saw and planing mills,
coke ovens, and other evidences of commercial development. Through the
open door of a church I saw a Catholic congregation already on its
knees, and the worshippers of various Protestant denominations were
looking towards their own temples. The old Pineville, happily situated
farther down the river, at the very opening of the pass, was rapidly
going to ruins. The passion for homicide had changed into a passion for
land speculation. The very man on whose account at my former visit the
old Pineville had been divided into two deadly factions, whose name
throughout all the region once stood for mediæval violence, had become a
real-estate agent. I was introduced to him.
"Sir," said I, "I don't feel so _very_ much afraid of you."
"Sir," said he, "I don't like to run myself."
Such, briefly, is the impression made by the new Pineville--a new people
there, new industries, new moral atmosphere, new civilization.
The explanation of this change is not far to seek. By virtue of its
commanding position as the only inner gateway to the North, this pass
was the central point of distribution for south-eastern Kentucky.
Flowing into the Cumberland, on the north side of the mountain, is Clear
Creek, and on the south side is Strait Creek, the two principal streams
of this region, and supplying water-power and drainage. Tributary to
these streams are, say, half a million acres of noble timber land; in
the mountains around, the best coals, coking and domestic; elsewhere,
iron ores, pure brown, hematite, and carbonates; inexhaustible
quantities of limestone, blue-gray sandstone, brick clays; gushing from
the mountains, abundant streams of healthful freestone water; on the
northern hill-sides, a deep loam suitable for grass and gardens and
fruits. Add to this that through this water-gap, following the path of
the Wilderness Road, as the Wilderness Road had followed the path of the
Indian and the buffalo--through this water-gap would have to pass all
railroads that should connect the North and South by means of that
historic and ancient highway of traffic and travel.
On the basis of these facts, three summers ago a few lawyers in
Louisville bought 300 acres of land near the riotous old town of
Pineville, and in the same summer was organized the Pine Mountain Iron
and Coal Company, which now, however, owns about twenty thousand acres,
with a capital stock of $2,000,000. It should be noted that Southern men
and native capital began this enterprise, and that although other
stockholders are from Chicago and New England, most of the capital
remains in the State. Development has been rapidly carried forward, and
over five hundred thousand dollars' worth of lots have been sold the
present year. It is pleasant to dwell upon the future that is promised
for this place; pleasant to hear that over six hundred acres in this
pleasant valley are to be platted; that there are to be iron-furnaces
and electric lights, concrete sidewalks and a street railway, more
bridges, brick-yards, and a high-school; and that the seventy-five coke
ovens now in blast are to be increased to a thousand. Let it be put down
to the credit of this vigorous little mountain town that it is the first
place in that region to put Kentucky coke upon the market, and create a
wide demand for it in remote quarters--Cincinnati alone offering to take
the daily output of 500 ovens.
Thus the industrial and human problems are beginning to solve themselves
side by side in the backwoods of Kentucky. You begin with coke and end
with Christianity. It is the boast of Pineville that as soon as it
begins to make its own iron it can build its houses without calling on
the outside world for an ounce of material.
III
Middlesborough! For a good many years in England and throughout the
world the name has stood associated with wealth and commercial
greatness--the idea of a powerful city near the mouth of the Tees, in
the North Riding of Yorkshire, which has become the principal seat of
the English iron trade. It is therefore curious to remember that near
the beginning of the century there stood on the site of this powerful
city four farm-houses and a ruined shrine of St. Hilda; that it took
thirty years to bring the population up to the number of one hundred and
fifty-four souls; that the discovery of ironstone, as it seems to be
called on that side, gave it a boom, as it is called on this; so that
ten years ago it had some sixty thousand people, its hundred and thirty
blast-furnaces, besides other industries, and an annual output in
pig-iron of nearly two million tons.
But there is now an English Middlesborough in America, which is already
giving to the name another significance in the stock market of London
and among the financial journals of the realm; and if the idea of its
founders is ever realized, if its present rate of development goes on,
it will in time represent as much wealth in gold and iron as the older
city.
In the mere idea of the American or Kentucky Middlesborough--for while
it seems to be meant for America, it is to be found in Kentucky--there
is something to arrest attention on the score of originality. That the
attention of wealthy commoners, bankers, scientists, and iron-masters of
Great Britain--some of them men long engaged in copper, tin, and gold
mines in the remotest quarters of the globe--that the attention of such
men should be focussed on a certain spot in the backwoods of Kentucky;
that they should repeatedly send over experts to report on the
combination of mineral and timber wealth; that on the basis of such
reports they should form themselves into a company called "The American
Association, Limited," and purchase 60,000 acres of land lying on each
side of the Cumberland Mountain, and around the meeting-point of the
States of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky; that an allied association,
called "The Middlesborough Town Company," should place here the site of
a city, with the idea of making it the principal seat of the iron and
steel manufacture of the United States; that they should go to work to
create this city outright by pouring in capital for every needed
purpose; that they should remove gigantic obstacles in order to connect
it with the national highways of commerce; that they should thus expend
some twenty million dollars, and let it be known that all millions
further wanted were forthcoming--in the idea of this there is enough to
make one pause.
As one cannot ponder the idea of the enterprise without being impressed
with its largeness, so one cannot visit the place without being struck
by the energy with which the plan is being wrought at. "It is not
sufficient to know that this property possesses coal and iron of good
quality and in considerable quantities, and that the deposits are
situated close together, but that they exist in such circumstances as
will give us considerable advantages over any competitors that either
now exist or whose existence can in any way be foreseen in the near
future." Such were the instructions of these English capitalists to
their agent in America. It was characteristic of their race and of that
method of business by which they have become the masters of commerce the
world over. In it is the germ of their idea--to establish a city for the
manufacture of iron and steel which, by its wealth of resources,
advantages of situation, and complete development, should place
competition at a disadvantage, and thus make it impossible.
It yet remains to be seen whether this can be done. Perhaps even the
hope of it came from an inadequate knowledge of how vast a region they
had entered, and how incalculable its wealth. Perhaps it was too much to
expect that any one city, however situated, however connected, however
developed, should be able to absorb or even to control the development
of that region and the distribution of its resources to all points of
the land. It suggests the idea of a single woodpecker's hoping to carry
off the cherries from a tree which a noble company of cats and jays and
other birds were watching; or of a family of squirrels who should take
up their abode in a certain hole with the idea of eating all the walnuts
in a forest. But however this may turn out, these Englishmen, having
once set before themselves their aim, have never swerved from trying to
attain it; and they are at work developing their city with the hope that
it will bring as great a change in the steel market of the United States
as a few years ago was made in the iron market by the manufacture of
Southern iron.
If you take up in detail the working out of their plan of development,
it is the same--no stint, no drawing back or swerving aside, no
abatement of the greatest intentions. They must have a site for their
city--they choose for this site what with entire truthfulness may be
called one of the most strategic mountain passes in American history.
They must have a name--they choose that of the principal seat of the
English iron trade. They must have a plant for the manufacture of steel
by the basic process--they promise it shall be the largest in the United
States. They want a tannery--it shall be the biggest in the world. A
creek has to be straightened to improve drainage--they spend on it a
hundred thousand dollars. They will have their mineral resources
known--they order a car to be built, stock it with an exposition of
their minerals, place it in charge of technical experts, and set it
going over the country. They take a notion to establish a casino,
sanitarium, and hotel--it must cost over seven hundred thousand dollars.
The mountain is in their way--that mighty wall of the Cumberland
Mountain which has been in the way of the whole United States for over a
hundred years--they remove this mountain; that is, they dig through it a
great union tunnel, 3750 feet long, beginning in Kentucky, running under
a corner of Virginia, and coming out in Tennessee. Had they done nothing
but this, they would have done enough to entitle them to the gratitude
of the nation, for it is an event of national importance. It brings the
South and the Atlantic seaboard in connection with the Ohio Valley and
the Lakes; it does more to make the North and the South one than any
other single thing that has happened since the close of the Civil War.
On the same trip that took me to Pineville five summers ago, I rode from
that place southward towards the wall of Cumberland Mountain. I wished
to climb this wall at that vast depression in it known as Cumberland
Gap. It was a tranquil afternoon as I took my course over the ancient
Wilderness Road through the valley of the Yellow Creek. Many a time
since, the memory of that ride has come back to me--the forests of
magnificent timbers, open spaces of cleared land showing the
amphitheatre of hills in the purple distance, the winding of a shadowy
green-banked stream, the tranquil loneliness, the purity of primeval
solitude. The flitting of a bird between one and the azure sky overhead
was company, a wild flower bending over the water's edge was friendship.
Nothing broke rudely in upon the spirit of the scene but here and there
a way-side log-cabin, with its hopeless squalor, hopeless human inmates.
If imagination sought relief from loneliness, it found it only in
conjuring from the dust of the road that innumerable caravan of life
from barbarism to civilization, from the savage to the soldier, that has
passed hither and thither, leaving the wealth of nature unravished, its
solitude unbroken.
In the hush of the evening and amid the silence of eternity, I drew the
rein of my tired horse on the site of the present town. Before me in the
mere distance, and outlined against the glory of the sky, there towered
at last the mighty mountain wall, showing the vast depression of the
gap--the portal to the greatness of the commonwealth. Stretching away in
every direction was a wide plain, broken here and there by wooded
knolls, and uniting itself with graceful curves to the gentle slopes of
the surrounding mountains. The ineffable beauty, the vast repose, the
overawing majesty of the historic portal, the memories, the
shadows--they are never to be forgotten.
[Illustration: FORD ON THE CUMBERLAND.]
A few weeks ago I reached the same spot as the sun was rising, having
come thither from Pineville by rail. As I stepped from the train I saw
that the shadowy valley of my remembrance had been incredibly
transformed. Some idea of the plan of the new town may be understood
from the fact that Cumberland Avenue and Peterborough Avenue,
intersecting each other near the central point of it, are, when
completed, to be severally three and a half or four and a half miles
long. There are twenty avenues and thirty streets in all, ranging from a
hundred feet to sixty feet wide. So long and broad and level are the
thoroughfares that the plan, as projected, suggests comparison with
Louisville. The valley site itself contains some six thousand available
acres.
It should be understood that the company owns property on the Tennessee
side of the gap, and that at the foot of the valley, where a
magnificent spring gushes out, with various other mineral springs near
by--chalybeate and sulphur--it is proposed to establish a hotel,
sanitarium, and casino which shall equal in sumptuousness the most noted
European spas.
As I stood one day in this valley, which has already begun to put on the
air of civilization, with its hotel and railway station and mills and
pretty homesteads, I saw a sight which seemed to me a complete epitome
of the past and present tendencies there at work--a summing up of the
past and a prophecy of the future. Creeping slowly past the station--so
slowly that one knows not what to compare it to unless it be the
minute-hand on the dial of a clock--creeping slowly along the Wilderness
Road towards the ascent of Cumberland Gap, there came a mountain wagon,
faded and old, with its dirty ragged canvas hanging motionless, and
drawn by a yoke of mountain oxen which seemed to be moving in their
sleep. On the seat in front, with a faded shovel-hat capping his mass of
coarse tangled hair, and wearing but two other garments--a faded shirt
and faded breeches--sat a faded, pinched, and meagre mountain boy. The
rope with which he drove his yoke had dropped between his clasped knees.
He had forgotten it; there was no need to remember it. His starved white
face was kindled into an expression of passionate hunger and excitement.
In one dirty claw-like hand he grasped a small paper bag, into the open
mouth of which he had thrust the other hand, as a miser might thrust his
into a bag of gold. He had just bought, with a few cents, some sweetmeat
of civilization which he was about for the first time to taste. I sat
and watched him move away and begin the ascent to the pass. Slowly,
slowly, winding now this way and now that across the face of the
mountain, now hidden, now in sight, they went--sleeping oxen, crawling
wagon, starved mountain child. At length, as they were about
disappearing through the gap, they passed behind a column of the white
steam from a saw-mill that was puffing a short distance in front of me;
and, hidden in that steam, they disappeared. It was the last of the
mountaineers passing away before the breath of civilization.
IV
Suppose now that you stand on the south side of the great wall of the
Cumberland Mountain at Cumberland Gap. You have come through the
splendid tunnel beneath, or you have crawled over the summit in the
ancient way; but you stand at the base on the Tennessee side in the
celebrated Powell's River Valley.
Turn to the left and follow up this valley, keeping the mountain on your
left. You are not the first to take this course: the line of human ants
used to creep down it in order to climb over the wall at the gap. Mark
how inaccessible this wall is at every other point. Mark, also, that as
you go two little black parallel iron threads follow you--a railroad,
one of the greatest systems of the South. All along the mountain slope
overhanging the railroad, iron ore; beyond the mountain crest, timbers
and coals. Observe, likewise, the features of the land: water abundant,
clear, and cold; fields heavy with corn and oats; an ever-changing
panorama of beautiful pictures. The farther you go the more rich and
prosperous the land, the kinder the soil to grains and gardens and
orchards; bearing its burden of timbers--walnut, chestnut, oak, and
mighty beeches; lifting to the eye in the near distance cultivated
hillsides and fat meadows; stretching away into green and shadowy valley
glades; tuneful with swift, crystal streams--a land of lovely views.
Remember well this valley, lying along the base of the mountain wall. It
has long been known as the granary of south-west Virginia and east
Tennessee; but in time, in the development of civilization throughout
the Appalachian region, it is expected to become the seat of a dense
pastoral population, supplying the dense industrial population of new
mining and manufacturing towns with milk, butter, eggs, and fruit and
vegetables. But for the contiguity of such agricultural districts to the
centres of ores and coals, it would perhaps be impossible to establish
in these remote spots the cities necessary to develop and transport
their wealth.
Follow this valley up for a distance of sixty miles from Cumberland Gap
and there pause, for you come to the head of the valley, and you have
reached another pass in the mountain wall. You have passed out of
Tennessee into Virginia, a short distance from the Kentucky border, and
the mountain wall is no longer called the Cumberland: twenty miles
southwest of where you now are that mountain divided, sending forth this
southern prong, called Stone Mountain, and sending the rest of itself
between the State line of Kentucky and Virginia, under the name of the
Big Black Mountain. Understand, also, the general bearings of the spot
at which you have arrived. It is in that same Alleghany system of
mountains--the richest metalliferous region in the world--the northern
section of which long ago made Pittsburgh; the southern section of which
has since created Birmingham; and the middle section of which, where you
now are, is claimed by expert testimony, covering a long period of years
and coming from different and wholly uninterested authorities, to be the
richest of the three.
This mountain pass not being in Kentucky, it might be asked why in a
series of articles on Kentucky it should deserve a place. The answer is
plain: not because a Kentuckian selected it as the site of a hoped for
city, or because Kentuckians have largely developed it, or because
Kentuckians largely own it, and have stamped upon it a certain excellent
social tone; but for the reason that if the idea of its development is
carried out, it will gather towards itself a vast net-work of railways
from eastern Kentucky, the Atlantic seaboard, the South, and the Ohio
and Mississippi valleys, which will profoundly affect the inner life of
Kentucky, and change its relations to different parts of the Union.
Big Stone Gap! It does not sound very big. What is it? At a certain
point of this continuation of Cumberland Mountain, called Stone
Mountain, the main fork of Powell's River has in the course of ages worn
itself a way down to a practical railroad pass at water-level, thus
opening connection between the coking coal on the north and the iron
ores on the south of the mountain. No pass that I have ever seen--except
those made by the Doe River in the Cranberry region of North
Carolina--has its wild, enrapturing loveliness; towering above on each
side are the mountain walls, ancient and gray and rudely disordered; at
every coign of vantage in these, grasping their precipitous buttresses
as the claw of a great eagle might grasp the uttermost brow of a cliff,
enormous trees above trees, and amid the trees a green lace-work of
undergrowth. Below, in a narrow, winding channel piled high with
bowlders, with jutting rocks and sluice-like fissures--below and against
these the river hurls itself, foaming, roaring, whirling, a long cascade
of white or lucent water. This is Big Stone Gap, and the valley into
which the river pours its full strong current is the site of the town. A
lofty valley it is, having an elevation of 1600 feet above the sea, with
mountains girdling it that rise to the height of 4000--a valley the
surface of which gently rolls and slopes towards these encircling bases
with constant relief to the eye, and spacious enough, with those opening
into it, to hold a city of the population of New York.
This mountain pass, lying in the heart of this reserved wilderness of
timbers, coals, and ores, has always had its slender thread of local
history. It was from a time immemorial a buffalo and Indian trail,
leading to the head-waters of the Cumberland and Kentucky rivers; during
the Civil War it played its part in certain local military exploits and
personal adventures of a quixotian flavor; and of old the rich farmers
of Lee County used to drive their cattle through it to fatten on the
pea-vine and blue-grass growing thick on the neighboring mountain tops.
But in the last twenty-five years--that quarter of the century which has
developed in the United States an ever-growing need of iron and steel,
of hard-woods, and of all varieties of coal; a period which has seen one
after another of the reserve timber regions of the country thinned and
exhausted--during the past twenty-five years attention has been turned
more and more towards the forests and the coal-fields in the region
occupied by the south Alleghany Mountain system.
It was not enough to know that at Big Stone Gap there is a water-gap
admitting the passage of a railway on each side at water-level, and
connecting contiguous workable coals with ores; not enough repeatedly to
test the abundance, variety, and purity of both of these; not enough to
know that a short distance off a single vertical section of coal-measure
rocks has a thickness above drainage level of 2500 feet, the thickest in
the entire Appalachian coalfield from Pennsylvania to Alabama; not
enough that from this point, by available railroad to the Bessemer steel
ores in the Cranberry district of North Carolina, it is the shortest
distance in the known world separating such coke and such ores; not
enough that there are here superabundant limestone and water, the south
fork of Powell's River winding about the valley, a full, bold current,
and a few miles from the town the head-waters of this same river having
a fall of 700 feet; not enough that near by is a rich agricultural
region to supply needed markets, and that the valley itself has a
natural drainage, delightful climate, and ideal beauty--all this was not
enough. It had to be known that the great water-gap through the mountain
at this point, by virtue of its position and by virtue of its relation
to other passes and valleys leading to it, necessitated, sooner or
later, a concentration here of railroad lines for the gathering, the
development, and the distribution of its resources.