The story
A little after three in the afternoon on Friday, October 2, 1925, a few bricks fell from the ceiling of the Church Hill Tunnel. They splashed into the water on the tunnel floor. The electric lights flickered. Then men started shouting for everyone to get clear.
Locomotive 231 was inside with ten flatcars, and roughly two hundred men were working along the passage. The train never came back out. More than a century later, it is still buried beneath Church Hill, under a quiet park with a sweeping view of the Richmond skyline.
A shortcut under the hill
The story starts in the 1870s, with a railroad looking for a shortcut. The Chesapeake and Ohio wanted an easier way to move its trains between its tracks and the docks along the James River, and Church Hill sat right in the way. So the railroad went underneath it.
The tunnel ran almost four thousand feet, roughly from 19th and East Marshall Streets to 31st and East Grace. It was finished in December 1873, and the state historical marker nearby calls it one of the longest tunnels in the country at the time.
Building it was a fight. Crews dug through unstable clay and water-soaked soil, and men died in cave-ins while the work went on. In January 1873, before the tunnel was even finished, the ground above it gave way near St. John's Church, damaging buildings, including the church's rectory. The hill had already shown what it could do, decades before it buried a train.
By the early 1900s the railroad had another route, and the old tunnel was mostly taken out of service.
Back inside, 1925
It could have stayed that way. But traffic was growing, and the C&O wanted more capacity through Richmond. In 1925 the railroad set out to reopen the tunnel. The old shortcut was still there. It just needed a lot of work.
Crews went back in to repair and reinforce it, digging out soil along the walls to make it usable again. That meant working inside a tunnel with a long history of trouble. Afterward, investigators pointed to a lack of proper bracing and to walls that had been weakened. They didn't all explain the failure the same way. Underneath every explanation was the same old problem: the ground itself was unstable.
The afternoon of October 2
That afternoon, 190 feet of the tunnel came down near its western end, right underneath Jefferson Park. Brick, earth and timber crashed down around the locomotive. Its boiler was crushed, and scalding steam poured out.
In the dark, most of the men scrambled toward the eastern end. Some crawled under the flatcars to get past the train. Others followed the walls toward daylight. Most of the roughly two hundred made it out.
The engineer, Thomas Mason, was trapped in the cab. His fireman, Benjamin Mosby, did get out, but he had been badly burned by the steam. He died that night at Grace Hospital.
Up on the surface, the ground in Jefferson Park split open, and a sidewalk and a stairway were swallowed by the shifting earth.
The men who didn't come home
The rescue went on for days. Teams dug down from the park, trying to reach the locomotive and anyone trapped near it, but new cave-ins kept slowing them down.
Above ground, Thomas Mason's family waited. Decades later, the public media station VPM reported, in a story with Mason's family, that his son Ralph, just eleven years old, stood outside the tunnel for days, watching for any sign his father was alive. After more than a week of digging, the rescuers recovered Mason's body.
Two other men were still missing: Richard Lewis, and a man recorded only as H. Smith. They are believed to have been Black day laborers. Neither man's body was ever recovered. We know the locomotive's number. For one of the missing men, history kept only an initial.
Why the train stayed
A coroner's jury later blamed Mason's death on negligence in the tunnel's bracing. The danger of another collapse hadn't gone anywhere. With the clay still caving in, digging the train out was judged too costly and too unsafe.
So in 1926 the railroad filled parts of the tunnel with sand and sealed it with concrete. Locomotive 231 and its ten flatcars stayed buried.
In 2006 there was an effort to explore bringing the locomotive out. It stalled over permits, amid fears that disturbing all that waterlogged, unstable soil could cause even more collapse. The train has never been recovered.
What the record shows, and what it doesn't
Two deaths are certain: Thomas Mason and Benjamin Mosby. Richard Lewis and H. Smith were reported missing and are presumed dead, which is why many accounts say four died. Some early reports said as many as six Black laborers were unaccounted for; later that number came down to two. That doesn't mean six men died. It does mean nobody should claim to know exactly how many did. The true toll is uncertain.
Accounts disagree about which way the train was heading when the roof came down, so the film doesn't say. Sources differ on exactly which day Mason was reached and which day he was recovered. And no one has proven which single failure started the collapse, beyond the bracing and the weakened walls the investigations described.
Some later tellings connect the tunnel to Richmond's vampire legend. That is folklore, not history, and it has its own film.
Seeing it today
Jefferson Park sits on a bluff above Shockoe Bottom, around North 21st and East Marshall Streets, with a panoramic view of downtown. It is easy to stand there and never know what lies beneath. The state historical marker for the tunnel stands on North 18th Street, about 200 feet west of the old western portal by its own text.
Please don't try to enter the tunnel or its portals. The ground is unstable and the sites are not public.
In 2025, a hundred years after the collapse, Richmond gathered to remember the men who were lost. Watch the film above for the whole story, told with the newspapers, maps and photographs of the time.
Sources
- Church Hill Tunnel historical marker inscription, Read the Plaque
- Sarah Vogelsong, The Richmonder, Oct. 2, 2025
- Ashley Branch, VPM, Sept. 30, 2021
- VPM/PBS, Hidden History with Brian Bullock, "Church Hill Tunnel" (2026)
- VirginiaPlaces, Church Hill Tunnel
- WTVR CBS 6, Oct. 1, 2025
- WWBT 12 On Your Side, Oct. 2, 2025
- Richmond Planet, Oct. 10 and Oct. 17, 1925, via Library of Congress, Chronicling America
Credits
Maps from the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division: Sanborn Map Company, 1886, 1905 and 1925, and F. W. Beers, Illustrated Atlas of the City of Richmond, Va., 1876. Newspapers from the Library of Congress, Chronicling America: the Richmond Planet (Oct. 10, 1925, with photographs from the Richmond News-Leader), The Bismarck Tribune, The Cordele Dispatch, the Evening Star (Washington) and The Daily Worker, all October 1925. Historic photographs and prints from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division (E. Sachse & Co., 1851; Civil War Photographs; Detroit Photographic Co. and Detroit Publishing Co.; National Photo Company), The New York Public Library (D. H. Anderson stereograph; Detroit Publishing Co. postcard, c. 1908) and Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, Special Collections and Archives (Harris H. Stilson); all public domain. Present-day photographs via Wikimedia Commons by Sean Dudley (CC0), Jpole1 (CC0), Eli Christman (CC BY 2.0), Esubterfuge (public domain) and Bdl2001 (CC BY 4.0). Video: K / Pexels. Scenes inside the tunnel are dramatized recreations, labelled on screen. Poster: Jefferson Park, photo by Sean Dudley (CC0), with an illustrated cutaway of the buried train. Original score.