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presents

The Roads and Rails of Mercer County, WV /

Bluestone Lumber Railway

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Though the major rail lines of Mercer County are well-documented, lesser-known aspects of the area's history are shrouded in levels of mystery.

Take the Bluestone Lumber railway, for example. For an eyeblink following the Virginian Railway's completion in 1909, it serviced lumber camps in the Brush Creek and Bluestone River valleys. This railway appears on select topographic maps drafted between 1913 and 1916, but few others. Portions of the line began to disappear by the 1920s, and by mid-century nearly all traces had vanished from sight. And that's not all: The full extent of the Bluestone Lumber railway's routing and trackage remains unknown.

As a matter of minor trivia, this operation was the closest that an operational railway ever came to the town of Athens. Its tracks passed just 2 kilometres away from the town's edge on the map, albeit at a far lower elevation.

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Points of interest

Gardner Junction

A: The southern terminus of the Bluestone Lumber Railway was at Gardner Junction, a Virginian railway stop just north of the company's Princeton shops. Despite the Virginian arrangement, the construction of the branch line north of the junction was reputedly done by the Bluestone Lumber Company itself.

How long did the branch survive in operation? Not very long, indeed. News sources as early as 1923 describe the lumber railway as "abandoned." By 1933 the grade between Gardner Junction and Gardner proper had been converted to a vehicular road (today's Brickyard Road), and designated CR 16.

Gardner

B: Gardner was the home of this branch line's primary industry: The Bluestone Lumber Company, which maintained an employee camp and sawmill on the banks of Brush Creek. This operation was well-established by 1910, and period maps show roughly 30 residential buildings arranged in rows alongside a small school and church.

The main north-south branch of this line terminated just north of the camp. It's probable that it used standard gauge, and allowed lumber to be loaded directly onto Virginian trains. Meanwhile, a branch off the branch continued to logging sites downstream, and this likely used narrow gauge to circumnavigate sharp bends and challenging terrain in the Brush Creek riverbed.

Period sources such as this pre-1910 postcard refer to the lumber camp as "Sharp's Camp." The main Virginian branch spans the entire width of the scene, abutted by stacks of finished lumber waiting to be shipped off.

Three parallel rows of residential buildings are visible in the distance, matching the arrangement on the map. The tallest structure is a water tower, standing just left of centre. This image was captured facing east, and the narrow-gauge branch track continuing to points further downstream is also visible (yellow arrow).

The sawmill was located at the southwest corner of the Gardner property, straddled by Brush Creek and the downstream branch track.

The camp's lumber yard was elevated to facilitate transfer onto railcars, and serviced by a web of narrow-gauge tracks more complex than evident on any map.

Thanks to what might be described charitably as "bad forest management" (or "dumbass shortsightedness"), the camp went bust, possibly in 1918, because they ran out of trees to cut down. By 1924, both the lumber railway and most of the town's buildings were gone. The remainder of the premises were repurposed by the Mercer County Commission as a segregated "poor farm," lasting until 1951. Today, the church is the only trace of the original camp that survives.

Eads Mill

C: North of the Gardner camp, the Bluestone Lumber railway meandered roughly 12 kilometres down the banks of Brush Creek, occasionally switching sides over what must have been primitive bridges. Brush Creek then flowed into the Bluestone River at Eads Mill, the site of a switchback and spur serving yet another lumber mill reducing oversized logs into railcar-sized bites.

Very interestingly, the Bluestone Lumber railway lasted longer in Eads Mill than it did in Gardner. Mid-1920s maps show the line intact on the banks of the Bluestone River, although it had completely disappeared from Brush Creek. With no remaining connection southward to either Gardner or the Virginian, it's unknown how lumber shipments would have interfaced. It's vaguely possible that a connection was made to the C&O in Hinton, or that lumber was transferred directly from the sawmill to trucks with no connection to the outside rail network at all...but the details of Eads Mill's rail operations remain mired in mystery.

A sawmill in Eads Mill is shown on the WV SRC base map of 1937 as an extant feature, though the rail line is not. It's probable that the operation closed shortly thereafter. No trace of a mill nor a railway bridge crossing exist in aerial images from 1958, although some portions of the grade were still evident at that time.

Today, Eads Mill itself has largely been forgotten. However, it lives on as the namesake of Eads Mill Road (CR 14 and CR 3).

Downstream mysteries

D: It is not presently known how far down the Bluestone River the lumber railway ultimately proceeded, or whether it ever reached the sites of Pipestem or Bluestone state parks. The only readily-available historic source materials that illustrate the line are USGS Bluefield quadrangles. North of 37°30', map coverage shifted to the Flat Top quadrangle...and the Bluestone Lumber railway is oddly absent from Flat Top maps, even those drafted and published during the period when the line was actually in use.

One news source claims that this railway had a far more extensive reach than maps indicate, interfacing with the Raleigh & Pocahontas Railway under common title:

"It was discovered that the descendants of the Bluestone Lumber Company, which operated near Exit 14, had the title to a 32-foot-wide narrow-gauge railroad line that ran all the way to Flat Top, Archer said. The county now owns the right of way. 'That railroad line and the right of way for it connects Mercer County and Summers County at Pipestem State Park,' Archer said. 'It also extends out to Camp Creek State Park; it's a network. So we're working together with Camp Creek State Park, Pipestem State Park and Summers County to develop a larger network of hiking, mountain bicycle trails and equestrian trails on this way.'"

This is spurious, though. It's indubitable that the Bluestone and Raleigh & Pocahontas railways operated at different times under different companies. Their known areas of operation were also far enough away that a connection between the two would have been impractical, though not impossible, to pull off.

That said, we haven't heard the last from Bluestone Lumber yet. That this century-forgotten rail line could become the foundation for a new network of recreational trails is exciting news indeed! It's also exciting how the attention brought by this project could facilitate new discoveries of old information relating to its history, routing, and construction more than 110 years ago...and solve the mystery at last.

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