First Railroad in Virginia

S-30

Just south of here are the earthen remains and stone culvert of the Chesterfield Railroad. Chartered by the Virginia General Assembly in 1829, the company in 1831 constructed the first railroad in Virginia, one of the earliest in the United States, to haul coal from the Midlothian mines to Manchester's wharves on the James River. Moncure Robinson (1802-1891), a railroad pioneer, designed the track on which the cars were powered by gravity, horses and mules. It remained in operation until the Richmond & Danville Railroad began providing service to the area in 1851.

Department of Historic Resources, 2004

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References/Bibliographic Citation:

Revelle W. Brown, Moncure Robinson (1802-1891) Genius of America’s Earliest Railways (New York: Newcomen Society of England, American Branch, 1949); Elizabeth Dabney Coleman, “Forerunner of Virginia’s First Railway,” Virginia Cavalcade, 4 (Winter 1954): 4-7; Franz Anton Gerstner, Early American Railroads: Franz Anton Ritter von Gerstner’s Die inner Communicationen (1842-1843); edited by Frederick C. Garnst; translated by David J. Diephouse and John C. Decker (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 295, 640, 686-687; Francis Earle Lutz, Chesterfield: An Old Virginia County (Richmond: William Byrd Press, 1954); Jeffrey M. O’Dell, Early Architecture and Historic Sites (Chesterfield, Va.: Chesterfield County, 1983), 480-481; Railroad History Timeline, http://www.rrmuseumpa.org/education/historytimeline1.htm, 12 August 2004; Darwin H. Stapleton, The Transfer of Early Industrial Technologies to America (Philadelphia, Pa.: American Philosophical Society, 1987), 122-168.