On a snow-covered winter afternoon in Washington County, Pennsylvania, I followed rural backroads to document a handful of historic landmarks.
On a snow-covered winter afternoon in Washington County, Pennsylvania, I followed rural backroads to document a handful of historic landmarks scattered across the countryside around Claysville and Waynesburg. The day began at a former railroad tunnel tied to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s Wheeling–Pittsburgh Subdivision, now repurposed as part of a rail-to-trail corridor, before the route turned south into quieter farm country in search of surviving one-room schoolhouses.
The Claysville tunnel traces its origins to the 1850s, when it was built for the Hempfield Railroad to move coal, iron, and general freight between the Ohio River and Pittsburgh. Absorbed into the B&O system, it later became an integral part of the Wheeling–Pittsburgh Subdivision, a heavily trafficked industrial line that served Washington County for more than a century. Trains carrying coal from nearby mines and materials bound for steel mills passed steadily through the bore until deindustrialization and declining freight volumes led to the line’s abandonment west of Washington in the mid-1980s. Today, the stabilized tunnel forms part of the National Pike Trail, preserving a tangible remnant of the region’s railroad past…