From every imaginable point of view a place like this is subject to unsparing test before it is finally fixed upon as a town site and enters upon a process of development. Nothing would better illustrate the tremendous power with which the new South, hand in hand with a new North, works with brains and capital and science. A few years ago this place was seventy miles from the nearest railroad. That road has since been built to it from the south; a second is approaching it from a distance of a hundred and twenty miles on the west; a third from the east; and when the last two come together this point will be on a great east and west trunk line, connecting the Ohio and Mississippi valleys with the Atlantic seaboard. Moreover, the Legislature of Kentucky has just passed an act incorporating the Inter-State Tunnel Railroad Company, and empowering it to build an inter-State double-track highway from the head-waters of the Cumberland and Kentucky rivers to Big Stone Gap, tunnelling both the Black and Cumberland Mountains, and affording a passway north and south for the several railways of eastern Kentucky already heading towards this point. The plan embraces two double-track toll tunnels, with double-track approaches between and on each side of the tunnel, to be owned and controlled by a stock company which shall allow all railroads to pass on the payment of toll. If this enterprise, involving the cost of over two million dollars, is carried out, the railroad problem at Big Stone Gap, and with it the problem of developing the mineral wealth of southwest Virginia and south-east Kentucky, would seem to be practically solved.
That so many railroads should be approaching this point from so many different directions seems to lift it at once to a position of extraordinary importance.
But it is only a few months since the nearest one reached there; and, since little could be done towards development otherwise, at Big Stone Gap one sees the process of town-making at an earlier stage than at Middlesborough. Still, there are under construction water-works, from the pure mountain river, at an elevation of 400 feet, six miles from town, that will supply daily 2,500,000 gallons of water; two iron-furnaces of a hundred tons daily capacity; an electric-light plant, starting with fifty street arc lights, and 750 incandescent burners for residences, and a colossal hotel of 300 rooms. These may be taken as evidences of the vast scale on which development is to be carried forward, to say nothing of a steam street railway, belt line, lumber and brick and finishing plants, union depot, and a coke plant modelled after that at Connellsville. And on the whole it may be said that already over a million dollars' worth of real estate has been sold, and that eight land, coal, and iron development companies have centred here the development of properties aggregating millions in value.