Crozet Homes
Click Here To
View All Crozet Homes For Sale In Albemarle County
Crozet was named for Colonel B. Claudius Crozet (1789-1864), a French
born civil engineer and artillery officer under Napoleon.
Claudius Crozet came to the United States in 1816.
He taught the first college course in descriptive geometry at
VMI.
Crozet was best remembered as the Chief Engineer for building the
seventeen mile long Blue ridge Railroad and the associated tunnels.
The record-breaking Blue Ridge tunnel beneath Rockfish Gap is 4,273
feet long and was accomplished entirely by manual drilling.
The 1866 Hotchkiss map and the 1875 Peyton map of Albemarle County
shows the Ballard, Rothwell and Wayland farms.
Other land owners in the area included the Jarman, Harris, Woods and
Toombs families.
The Toombs farm is marked Toomb's Distillery and Nursery on the 1875
map.
Most area farmers were still growing wheat and tobacco but as early
as 1856 the Toombs family had been growing peaches and pippin apples.
The village of Crozet grew slowly during its early years. Eight years
after the creation of the railroad stop, listings in the 1884/85 gazetteer for Crozet include only two genEral
merchants, J. M. Ellison and B. E. Smith and six principal farmers.
In 1893/1894, the gazetteer lists only one genEral merchant (J. M.
Ellison, again), one nurseryman and seedsman, E. W. Robertson, and seven principal farmers.
Ellison arrived in Crozet from his native Augusta County in the
mid-1880s.
He built the Liberty Hall Hotel, now demolished, to serve summer
guests coming to Miller School.
Summer boarders from Richmond also frequented this hotel which
operated until the 1920s.
The development of the orchard industry in western Albemarle County
provided the impetus for growth in Crozet.
The Waylands planted the first commercially planted orchard in
Crozet. It began to bear fruit in 1890, and its success encouraged other farmers in the area to begin fruit
production.
The early 1900s was a period of great prosperity and physical
development in Crozet's history.
One manifestation of this growth was the prolifEration of churches in
town. Crozet Methodist was built in 1889.
St. George Episcopal Chapel, no longer standing, was built in
1898.
Crozet Baptist Church was built in 1907. It, too, is no longer
standing.
Tabor Presbyterian Church moved to a new building in Crozet in 1915
from its earlier site near the intersection of Routes 240 and 250.
Black residents built Union Mission Baptist Church in 1914.
After the train depot was built, a post office was established and
the road between the Miller school and Crozet was hard surfaced.
In the 1890's, the first commercially planted orchards were
established, soon followed by many other farmers planting fruit trees.
As the fruit industry grew, many related businesses were attracted to the area.
Between 1906 and 1910, a cold storage plant was built, a bank and
hotel were constructed and a church and a school were built.
By the mid 1920's, the annual production of fruit had reached 159,000
barrels and that of peaches, 500,000 crates.
During the thirties, Crozet lead the state in the production of
Albemarle Pipin and Winesap apples and Crozet came to be referred to as the "Peach Capital of Virginia."
During this period, several new and varied industries located in
Crozet.
The roads leading into Crozet were also paved during this time
period.
After more than a half of a century as the center of fruit
production, Crozet began to change in 1950.
Every year, more and more orchards were taken out of production as
orchardists found they could make more money selling trees for firewood then trying to raise fruit.
Acme Visible Records Inc. built its headquarters and manufacturing
building in Crozet in 1950 and for the first time, steady employment that was unrelated to the ups and downs of the
fruit industry was offered to the citizens of Crozet.
In 1953, Morton foods moved to Crozet.
The community lost it's high school in 1953 as the School Board
sought to improve high school education through a consolidated high school (Albemarle high School).
In 1966, the County constructed Brownsville elementary School and
Henley Middle School.
The first major shopping center in Crozet began in 1965 with the
construction of an IGA Foodliner, in what is now the Crozet Shopping Plaza.
In 1977, Western Albemarle High School was constructed and in 1978,
the Western Albemarle Rescue Squad was created.
In 1985, the fire station was moved to new building on Three Notch'd
Road.
Around the same time period, the Crozet passenger train station was
officially dedicated as the new home for the Crozet Library.
The
Legend of Claudius Crozet
He engineered a course through Russian snow
And staked road beyond the torpid Nile,
Around the Alps and to the river Po,
Mapped out an army's passage mile by mile.
His emperor who conquered half the earth
Holds last dominion under English sand
And Claude Crozet, who ground an exile's berth,
Surveys a turnpike through the Gauley land.
He takes his compass from a leather sack,
Sets up a tripod, lets his line fall plumb,
And shadowing the short-cut bison track
Lays out a broader road for days to come.
Now troops may march by Gauley shore
And booted captains ride,
And great wheels roll the freight of war
Up Gauley's flint-ribbed side
Colonel
B. Claudius Crozet (1789-1864)
By some accounts, Claudius Crozet was born in Villefranche, France on
December 31, 1789 and by other accounts he was born on January 2, 1790.
His father was a wholesale wine merchant.
He entered a special engineering school, L'Ecole Polytechnique, on
November 18, 1805 and graduated as lieutenant on October 1, 1807.
Crozet graduated from the Imperial Artillery School as a second
lieutenant on June 9, 1809.
While there, he studied bridge building.old trail crozet
During the French invasion of Russia (1812), Claudius Crozet was
taken by the Russian Army as a prisoner of war at Borodino, outside of Moscow.
As a prisoner of war, Crozet went to live with a Russian nobleman who
took a liking to him.
Crozet learned to speak Russian and wrote a Russian
textbook.
The French were not successful and their leader, Napoleon, was
removed from power.
Crozet resigned from military duty on April 11, 1816.
In the fall of 1816, Crozet and his bride headed for
America.
Almost immediately after arriving in America, Crozet began work as a
professor of engineering at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York.
While at West Point, Crozet wrote a textbook Treatise on Descriptive
Geometry, published in 1821 and was said to have redesigned the West Point uniform.
Crozet also designed several of the buildings at West
Point.
Crozet was an animated teacher and is credited by some as being the
first to use the chalkboard as an instructional tool.
Crozet had some difficult times at West Point, but he had earned
respect from many people.
Thomas Jefferson referred to Claudius Crozet as "by far the best
mathematician in the United States."
In early spring of 1821, Crozet wrote to Mr. Jefferson, requesting a
job at the University of Virginia.
Jefferson responded that the University didn't have any buildings yet
and wasn't ready to hire professors.
The University of Virginia was founded in 1819 but students arrived
several years later.
On April 9, 1823, Crozet was elected Principal Engineer and Surveyor
of Public Works of Virginia.
He resigned from his duties at West Point shortly after this and
began his new job in June.
Crozet brought his wife and two children (a boy and a girl) with him
to live in Richmond, Virginia.
As chief engineer for the Northwestern Turnpike, the state of
Virginia hired Claudius Crozet.
In 1837, Crozet returned to Virginia from Louisiana as the Principal
Engineer to work on roads, canals, railroads and other points of necessity for the state.
Some railroads were already under construction and the canal system
had reached its potential.
In 1839, Crozet surveyed the Blue Ridge Mountains and determined that
the best way to allow the railroad to cross the mountain would be through a series of tunnels.
The
Tunnels
At first the railroad came over the mountains, but in 1858 the Blue
Ridge tunnel, engineered by Claudius Crozet, was completed eliminating much of the slow and dangerous climb up
Afton Mountain.
Colonel Crozet was a French engineer who had been instrumental in
directing the building of four tunnels, models of their kind for that time, between Mechum's River and
Waynesboro.
The town of Crozet is named in his honor.
The Greenwood tunnel through the rock-solid mountain below Rockfish
Gap carried traffic from 1858-1944.
His talents were tested in solving safety, drainage and ventilation
problem posed by the construction of this tunnel.
The Greenwood
Tunnel
Above the tunnel is the Blue Ridge Parkway.
This is the very top of the climb up the Blue Ridge for southbound
trains; it’s all basically downhill to Waynesboro.
After the War of 1812, various eastern seaboard states turned their
faces westward to secure the trade of the newly settled areas.
Early in 1816, Governor Wilson Cary Nicholas called the attention of
the Virginia General Assembly to the active interest New York and Pennsylvania had demonstrated in securing this
trade.
The Legislature responded by passing an act creating a fund for
internal improvements and for a board of public works to administer it.old trail crozet
Then, following the death of Thomas Moore, the state's engineer, in
1822, Claudius Crozet was selected from a pool of candidates to become Virginia's next chief engineer.
General Winfield Scott wrote of Crozet: "In point of genius, theory,
and practice, I have no question that he is the first man in America for the vacancy in question."
In June 1823, Claudius, Agathe and their family moved to Richmond,
and he immediately plunged into his new duties.
Working largely in the field, he made countless surveys for canals,
turnpikes, and highways.
At this time, Virginia extended all the way from the Atlantic Ocean
to the Ohio River and was the largest state east of the Mississippi River.
It included what is now the State of West Virginia.
The James River was the central waterway, but the vast area was laced
with numerous more-or-less navigable rivers, though many required herculean efforts to make them so.
Proponents of the James River Canal hoped to have an all-water route
to the Ohio, but Crozet felt that only a railroad could be used over the mountain chain to connect the canal's
segments, much as was being done with the Pennsylvania system and its Allegheny Portage Railroad.
Meanwhile, he surveyed routes for several roads, such as the Staunton
& Parkersburg Turnpike and the famed Valley Turnpike, which would become the campaign highway of northern and
southern armies in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War.
While the roads, as built, sometimes deviated from his surveys, the
construction of the Interstate system, some 150 years later, frequently used Crozet's routes.
He also surveyed a possible rail route from Lynchburg to Tennessee
(later used by the Norfolk & Western Railway).
In a report in 1831, Crozet observed that "Canals have done their
best; railroads now are at least equal to them, and are still advancing toward perfection."
Citing "delays and procrastination," he resigned his post in 1832.old
trail crozet
He was offered a position as the first chief engineer of the State of
Louisiana in the same year.
His acceptance was quick because he had relatives living there, the
state had a large French-speaking population, the salary would be $5,000, and it would be a welcomed change for his
family.
The Mississippi River was the dominant political and social concern
in Louisiana.
The Pontchartrain Railroad, the first line west of the Appalachian
Mountains, was chartered in 1830 and was in operation by 1832.
Louisiana Governor Roman formally announced to the Legislature that
"Colonel Crozet is ready to execute any survey that they may order."
Crozet considered a Louisiana to Virginia railroad but was quickly
swamped with legislators' pet projects.
He complained, "It is not a general and extensive system which is
objectionable; the small and unconnected works alone are too unproductive and will become ruinous if
multiplied."
He began numerous swamp-draining projects, surveyed the route of the
Clinton & Port Hudson Railroad, and argued against canal proposals to connect with the Mississippi River (which
could rise as much as 30 feet in high water).
It was clear that legislative interference would be even more of a
problem in Louisiana than in Virginia.
Crozet resigned from the position in mid-1834.
He assumed the presidency of Jefferson College at Convent, La. (now
Manresa Retreat House), a state-supported institution, and later was civil engineer of the City of New
Orleans.
Virginia's Governor Campbell called Col. Crozet back once again to be
the chief engineer for the state in 1837.
He was happy to return to Virginia.
In addition to his engineering duties, Crozet was appointed chairman
of the Board of Visitors at a new military college in Lexington, which would be called the Virginia Military
Institute (VMI).
At its first meeting, the members of the board elected Crozet
president of the board, a position he held for six years, while remaining the state's chief engineer.
Upon his return to Virginia, he found that the "powers that be" were
still very committed to canals.
But there were railroads for him to inspect and review.
One was the Richmond & Fredericksburg, later renamed the
Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac.
During the year of 1837, he rode that railroad and remarked that
"excessive rocking of cars indicated a derangement in the level of the rails, in consequence of the
settling."
Two years later he reported, "Experience has demonstrated the
inadequacy of flat rails fastened on wooden sleepers, especially of oak, to bear the action of heavy engines moving
with great velocities; under such a weight, the narrow and thin bar yields and sinks into the wood, the sills
themselves resting on the natural ground, sink and rise alternatively, and ultimately settle very
irregularly.
In passing over so uneven a surface, the train rocks and undulates to
the reciprocal injury of superstructure and vehicles."old trail crozet
Concluding his comments on the so called "strap rail," Crozet said,
"I think it would be true and sound economy to substitute a heavy iron track to the light plate rail
superstructure, which has unfortunately been chosen for all the railroads in Virginia, and is the chief cause of
the difficulties under which the companies presently labor."
Crozet toured the Baltimore & Ohio in 1841, and was highly
complementary of its operations.
He felt that, from its connection at Harpers Ferry, the Winchester
& Potomac should be extended up the Shenandoah Valley beyond Winchester, rather than relying on the Valley
Turnpike to serve the rest of the valley.
(On a note familiar to modern highway engineers, he complained about
the damage that overloaded wagons did to turnpikes.)
VMI finally opened in November of 1839, with Crozet as the architect
of the college's academic program and military organization.
VMI would become a major training institution for engineers and
militia officers for Virginia and the South.
He continued to write mathematics and geometry textbooks and
supervised the surveying and publication of a new state map.
Arguments over extending the canal system arose again and political
pressure resulted in the chief engineer position being abolished.
(The James Canal never went beyond Buchanan, Va., with a branch to
Lexington.)
After serving briefly as the principal of the Richmond Academy, a
private school, Crozet was appointed chief engineer of the Blue Ridge Railroad in 1849.
This was a separately chartered line to connect with the Louisa
Railroad, which had been building west from Gordonsville.
The Blue Ridge Railroad would construct the difficult 17 miles from
Mechum's River to Waynesboro, Va., crossing its namesake mountains.
Crozet had made a survey of the proposed line ten years earlier,
suggesting a route via Rockfish Gap.
He had at that time made the first proposal for the use of
switchbacks to conquer a heavy grade.
His later surveys, however, proposed a line with heavy cuts, massive
fills, and four tunnels.old trail crozet
This, the future Chesapeake & Ohio
mainline, would be one of the most ambitious rail projects to that time.
The Blue Ridge Tunnel, at the summit and 4,250 feet in length, when
completed would be the world's longest.
It was 700 feet below the top of the ridge.
To the east, there would be the "Short" or "Little Rock" tunnel,
ironically the only one of the original four still in use.
Two miles further, the 800-foot Brookville Tunnel was bypassed when
Interstate 64 was built.
Finally, Greenwood Tunnel, 500 feet long, was bypassed by a cut in
1944.
Averaging only 19 feet per month, drilling the Blue Ridge Tunnel was
painfully slow.
Air quality was bad, the working space was very limited and a cholEra
epidemic claimed many lives.
Workers on the tunnel encountered excessively hard rock on the east
portion; the west portal required timbering, and later arching with brick.
Crozet reported being taken by surprise by the eruption of a large
vein of water, "for which we were obliged to take hands from their work and set them pumping until we could obtain
machinery for that purpose..."
The Brookville tunnel project was plagued by "soft, rotten slate,"
causing frequent rock falls from the ceiling, a constant danger to the workers.
Another major project was the construction of a massive fill at the
east portal of the Blue Ridge Tunnel, 135 feet high and 720 feet long.
The grade through the tunnel itself was 70 feet to the mile, with the west portal 56
feet higher than the east portal.old trail crozet
Many of the workers were Irish.
Trouble erupted when the tunnel workers (mostly men from County Cork)
marched against the "Fardowners" (men from Northern Ireland who were grading the line).
A considerable fight began, quarters were burned, the militia was
called out and arrests were made.
Charges were dropped when the leaders explained, "They just wanted to
have a little fight!"
The people of the Shenandoah Valley were impatient and many wanted to
hurry the process by building a temporary line across the top of the mountain.
The tracks were placed in a series of inclined planes with a
stationary engine pulling a limited number of cars up the heavy grades.
There were three such sections of track: one and one-half mile over
Brookville Hill, three miles around Robertson's Cut, and four and a half miles over the Blue Ridge.
Later, the company bought engines capable of hauling three cars at a
time over the temporary track.
The main tunnel was finally holed through on Christmas Day,
1856.
Earlier, the president of the Board of Public Works, E.J. Armstrong, had reported
that "no description that he or this board could give would afford anything like an accurate idea of the many
dangers that have retarded the progress and accumulated cost and peril, far beyond original
expectation."
Crozet said in his report, "The main tunnel will cost, all included,
as close a calculation as I can make, about $464,000.
The whole length at the floor is 4,273 ft., making the cost per
linear foot $106.60, and $7.00 per cubic yard, including arching of about 800 ft., ventilating, pumping, and
portal.
The excavation of this excessively hard rock is $5.00 per yard. It
will have taken six and one-quarter years in its construction."
The main tunnel remained in use until 1944, when the C&O
excavated a newer bore, at a slightly lower elevation, and with greater dimensions for modern motive power and
cars.
Crozet's next position would be working with the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers in the construction of the Washington Aqueduct, a federal project to bring water from the Great Falls of
the Potomac to the District of Columbia.
A major feature of this work was the Cabin John bridge, which for
some 50 years was the longest masonry arch in the world.
Work on the aqueduct was stopped, however, due to financial
stringency in 1859.old trail crozet
Crozet returned to Virginia, where he was appointed chief engineer of
the Virginia & Kentucky Railroad, which would eventually become the main line of the Norfolk & Western
Railway.
Virginia left the Union in April 1861 and, after preliminary surveys,
the work was suspended with the coming of the Civil War.
President Jefferson Davis interviewed Crozet, who offered his
services to the Confederacy.
(Davis had used Crozet's textbooks as a West Point cadet.)
Apparently due to his age, the offer was declined. Crozet resigned
himself to inactivity and died at the home of his daughter on January 29, 1864, at the age of 74.
Originally buried in Richmond, his remains were removed to a grave in
front of the library at VMI on November 11, 1942.
His gravestone reads:
"Colonel Claudius Crozet
Born in France Dec. 31, 1789
Died in Virginia Jan. 29, 1864
Soldier, Scholar, Educator,
Engineer, Chairman of the First
Board of Visitors V.M.I.
1837-1845"
More Crozet
Information
Public high school in Crozet:
Western Albemarle High (Students: 981; Location: 5941 Rockfish Gap
Tpke.; Grades: 09 - 12) Western Albemarle High School
Private high schools in Crozet:
The Miller School
Public primary/middle schools in Crozet:
J.T. Henley Middle School (Students: 627; Location: 5880 Rockfish Gap
Tpke.; Grades: 06 - 08)Henley Middle School
Crozet Elementary (Students: 368; Location: 1407 Crozet Ave.; Grades:
PK - 05) Crozet Elementary School
Brownsville Elementary (Students: 304; Location: 5870 Rockfish Gap
Tpke.; Grades: KG - 05) Brownsville Elementary School
Private primary/middle school in Crozet:
Crossroads Waldorf School (Students: 164; Location: 1408 CROZET AVE;
Grades: PK - 8) Crossroads Waldorf School
Elevation: 721 feet
County: Albemarle
Land area: 3.7 square miles
Zip code: 22932
Median resident age: 37.1 years
Median household income: $46,275
Median house value: $233,700
Hospitals/Medical Centers near Crozet:
UVA HEALTHSOUTH REHABILITATION HOSPITAL (about 12 miles;
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA)
MARTHA JEFFERSON HOSPITAL (about 14 miles; CHARLOTTESVILLE,
VA)
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINA HOSPITAL (about 14 miles; CHARLOTTESVILLE,
VA)
|