Excerpt from The Washington and Ohio Railroad: A Glance at the Country Through Which It Passes, Between Washington, D. C., And the Ohio River, a Distance of 325 Miles The Washington and Ohio Rail Road Company, a corporation originally chartered by the General Assembly of Virginia under the title of "The Alexandria, Loudoun, and Hampshire Rail Road Company," was at first intended to extend only from the city of Alexandria, in the State of Virginia, to the coal fields of Hampshire, then in said State, now a county of West Virginia, a distance of about 180 miles. But the great importance of a through and direct connection across the States of Virginia and West Virginia, between the Ohio River on the west, and the city of Washington, The National Capital, with its commodious roadstead at Alexandria, Va., on the east, induced this company to apply to the Legislature of the State of West Virginia for authority to extend its line through that State to the most suitable point within its limits on the Ohio. The Legislature of West Virginia, on the 19th day of February, 1870, passed "an act" conferring upon this company the necessary authority "to extend and construct their railroad from the line of the State of Virginia, westwardly, through the State of West Virginia, to the west bank of the Ohio River at any point between the Little Kanawha and the Big Sandy Rivers, and to connect said railroad, by branches, with the Chesapeake and Ohio Rail Road and with the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Road, and to construct such other branches, not to exceed fifty miles in length in any one case, as might be deemed expedient." Under this authority, the Washington and Ohio Rail Road Company caused the necessary surveys to be made, and, on the report of its engineers, decided upon Point Pleasant, in Mason County, as the most advantageous location for its terminus on the Ohio, a distance of 325 miles from tide-water on the Potomac at Washington and Alexandria. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.