page_title: History of Virginia
section_title: Infrastructure and Industrial Revolution
hierarchical_section_title: History of Virginia / Early Republic and antebellum periods / Infrastructure and Industrial Revolution
caption_attribution_description: English: The exterior view of the blast furnace of the Washington Iron Works, Franklin County, Virginia.
context_page_description: The History of Virginia begins with documentation by the first Spanish explorers to reach the area in the 1500s, when it was occupied chiefly by Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan peoples. After a failed English attempt to colonize Virginia in the 1580s by Walter Raleigh, permanent English colonization began in Virginia with Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. The Virginia Company colony was looking for gold but failed and the colonists could barely feed themselves. The famine during the harsh winter of 1609 forced the colonists to eat leather from their clothes and boots and resort to cannibalism. The colony nearly failed until tobacco emerged as a profitable export. It was grown on plantations, using primarily indentured servants for the intensive hand labor involved. After 1662, the colony turned black slavery into a hereditary racial caste. By 1750, the primary cultivators of the cash crop were West African slaves. While the plantations thrived because of the high demand for tobacco, most white settlers raised their families on subsistence farms.
context_section_description: After the Revolution, various infrastructure projects began to be developed, including the Dismal Swamp Canal, the James River and Kanawha Canal, and various turnpikes. Virginia was home to the first of all Federal infrastructure projects under the new Constitution, the Cape Henry Light of 1792, located at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Following the War of 1812, several Federal national defense projects were undertaken in Virginia. Drydock Number One was constructed in Portsmouth in the 1827. Across the James River, Fort Monroe was built to defend Hampton Roads, completed in 1834.
  In the 1830s, railroads began to be built in Virginia. In 1831, the Chesterfield Railroad began hauling coal from the mines in Midlothian to docks at Manchester (near Richmond), powered by gravity and draft animals. The first railroad in Virginia to be powered by locomotives was the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad, chartered in 1834, with the intent to connect with steamboat lines at Aquia Landing running to Washington, D.C.. Soon after, others (with equally descriptive names) followed: the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad and Louisa Railroad in 1836, the Richmond and Danville Railroad in 1847, the Orange and Alexandria Railroad in 1848, and the Richmond and York River Railroad. In 1849, the Virginia Board of Public Works established the Blue Ridge Railroad. Under Engineer Claudius Crozet, the railroad successfully crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains via the Blue Ridge Tunnel at Afton Mountain.
  Petersburg became a manufacturing center, as well as a city where free black artisans and craftsmen could make a living. In 1860, half its population was black and of that, one-third were free blacks, the largest such population in the state.
caption: Remains of the Washington Iron Furnace in Franklin County, which operated from about 1770 to 1850.[109]
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