History of Coal Transport in Hampton Roads

Both Lambert's Point, Norfolk and East End Newport News grew up around coal export starting in the 1860s.

Newport News

Collis Potter Huntington’s rail line, the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O), started exporting coal out of Newport News in 1881. Huntington had previously purchased land in the Tidewater area starting in 1865 after identifying its untapped economic potential as a natural harbor. In 1871, Huntington oversaw the C&O as incarcerated workers constructed the rail lines stretching from Richmond, Virginia to the Ohio River. Huntington founded a town in West Virginia to  start developing coal mining there. He named the town Huntington.

Ten years later, in 1881, Huntington’s C&O built the Peninsula Subdivision which runs from Church Hill in Richmond to the tip of Hampton Roads in what was then Warwick County. This is the foundation of coal export from Newport News. Prior to this, Newport News was a sleepy farm town.

Norfolk

In 1885, in Norfolk, the Norfolk & Western rail company was born out of the reorganized Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio railway (AM & O). Frederick J. Kimball, a civil engineer with an interest in geology, became the first Vice President. Kimball led N&W’s foray into shipping and exporting coal. The company opened the pier at Lambert’s Point in order to export coal in 1886. There had already been an export terminal in Lambert’s Point since 1851, where it was constructed as part of the Norfolk & Petersburg railroad. Many of the early residents of Lambert’s Point were employees of the terminal. Also in this year, N&W purchased the Pocahontas Coke and Coal Company, a conglomerate that formed the coalfieds’ largest landowner and represented 400,000 acres of bituminous coal reserves.

By 1900, Norfolk was the lead coal exporter on the East Coast. Pier 6 at Lambert’s Point is now the largest and fastest facility for transloading coal in the Northern Hemisphere. (source: Norfolk Southern) In 1982, Norfolk & Western merged with Southern Railways to form Norfolk & Southern as a tactic to compete more effectively with CSX. N&S and CSX have a duopoly on transcontinental freight rail lines in the Eastern US.