In December, 2019 TCWPA’s Three Star tour participants explored sites of Union attacks on the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad Bridges near present day Johnson City and Watauga. Historian Jim Ogden led the mostly driving tour, exploring sites that were part of the Union’s strategic directive to disrupt the great Trunk Line Railroad.
Tour participants of the 2019 Three Star Tour gather with historian Jim Ogden.
Tour participants view the railroad bridge over the Watauga at historic Carter’s Depot. The presence of a Confederate company kept the bridge from being burned during the Unionist uprising in November 1861, but it was destroyed during Samuel P. Carter’s raid a year later. The original antebellum piers continue to support the modern railroad bridge at the site today.
At the wooden bridge in Elizabethton, Ogden describes how Civil War era railroad bridges were typically wooden truss bridges and covered to protect the untreated wooden timbers. Their wooden construction made them very susceptible to fire – and an easy target in war. Photo Credit: Ned Jilton, II, Kingsport Times News
