Lewis D. Gasteiger, vice president of the new Pittsburgh Lumber Company in Carter County, Tennessee conspired with William Flinn, president of Booth & Flynn, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania construction firm to build a spur connection the East Tennessee & Western North Carolina railway. The ensuing railway connected Elizabethon to Laban, Tennessee and enabled unfinished lumber to the Southern Railway. The Laurel Fork Railroad was incorporated in April of 1910 and abandoned in 1925.

Includes acts of extraordinary and extra sessions (called 1920-29 Acts of the State of Tennessee passed by the General Assembly, and 1931-44 Public and private acts of the State of Tennessee pass by the General Assembly)

THE RAILROAD TO NOWHERE contains the stories of five northwestern North Carolina business ventures: the Copper Knob Mine (a.k.a. the Gap Creek Mine); "Cowles' Stand" (the A. D. Cowles & Co. Store); the Deep Gap Tie & Lumber Co. RR (the "Railroad to Nowhere"); the V. L. Moretz & Son Lumber Co. (formerly the Deep Gap Tie & Lumber Co.); and Appalachian Ski Mountain (formerly the Blowing Rock Ski Lodge). These businesses were all located in the North Carolina counties of either Watauga or Ashe (BOTH counties, in the case of the Deep Gap Tie & Lumber Co. Railroad). Like all business ventures, some were successful, some were, well, not so successful. (One of the businesses, Appalachian Ski Mountain, continues today, very much alive and healthy.) Even though these business were diverse in their activities - a copper mine, a general store, a railroad, a lumber company, a ski resort - they all can trace their roots back to one man: Calvin J. Cowles.