INDUSTRIALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS 153geological research since then.
While Hotchkiss was compiling the map in
1873 his task took on greater urgency, for Collis
Huntington had just opened the first railroad line
to the mines of West Virginia. Constructed along
the Kanawha and New rivers, the railroad traversed
gorges and tunneled through mountains to transport
coal mined by the company to Richmond. By owning
both the mines and the transportation, Huntington
demonstrated the enormous profits to be made in
Virginia, West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky. His
success sparked a rush of railroad construction to the
coal fields over the next several decades.
Hotchkiss directly advanced this boom through
maps that guided both railroad investment and
land sales. His mining journal of the 1880s, The
Virginias, included dozens of original topographic and
geological maps of this forbidding terrain. Hotchkiss
understood that the biggest impediment to coal
extraction in the region was the absence of reliable
geological information. His efforts—such as the map
on the next page—attracted the capital required to
make the region one of the nation’s most important
sources of coal by the turn of the century.