The Irish and enslaved workforce

The Blue Ridge Tunnel was built by 800 to 1,500 Irish immigrants, mostly from County Cork, and 40 to 300 enslaved African Americans hired primarily as blacksmiths and floorers under contract from their enslavers.

At least fourteen Irish laborers were killed by powder explosions and rockfalls. Three enslaved men died in railcar accidents. The 1854 cholera epidemic killed many more in the labor camps; a precise count was never recorded, but the death toll across the entire project is conservatively put at 189.

Crozet himself, like many Virginians of his class, was an enslaver. The 1840 census records that he personally enslaved at least four individuals, and his engineering projects employed enslaved labor extensively.