Huntington's Vision For The Peninsula
Virginia's long dream for the C&O had been trade with the west, and Huntington's work accomplished that by 1873. However, he and others also realized that the new railroads for the first time offered a practical way to ship coal. The region's high quality bituminous coal had been known to be among West Virginia's vast natural resources, but until now, there had been no way to transport it to markets. The new C&O railroad provided a method of transporting this valuable product out of the mountains and east to Richmond, where ocean-going shipping called. However, one problem they faced was that depth of the channels of the tidal portion of the river to reach Richmond was insufficient to accommodate the draft required by the large colliers.
As a young man in 1837, Collis P. Huntington had visited the rural village known as Newport News Point in Warwick County at the mouth of the James River on the harbor of Hampton Roads. It later became clear that Huntington had never forgotten his 1837 visit to Newport News Point. By the early 1870s, he and his associates began buying up land on the Peninsula, nowhere more intensely than in Warwick County, where their Old Dominion Land Company soon owned enough for a railroad line, a coal pier and even more. In 1873, Major Robert H. Temple surveyed a railway line from Richmond to the mouth of the James River.
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