The Clifton Forge Underground is pretty unique... How many towns have a giant empty space beneath their downtown area? There are two reasons this empty space exists: Smith Creek, which runs through the center of town, and the C&O Railroad, which had a siding that ran along Smith Creek. Basically, the heart of downtown Clifton Forge was built twenty feet in the air, to allow for rail cars to pass underneath. This also eliminated the threat of flooding from Smith Creek. Nowadays, not much more remains of the old railroad siding than a few loose ties, about twenty feet of track, and freight doors in a few of the nearby buildings.

I thought I'd seen the entire Clifton Forge Underground, until Random and I stopped by there on the way home from camping out at the Virginia Ordnance Works. This time, Smith Creek was lower than usual, allowing us to easily cross to the far side of the Underground from the entrance. There, we found a human-sized hole broken through a wall...

...leading into a series of abandoned cellars! How cool is that? We couldn't believe what we had found... the stone-walled cellars we huge, and looped around to form a sort of horseshoe shape. A door in one wall opened up onto a tall concrete platform above Smith Creek, overlooking the more open part of the Underground. We came across other neat features, like a spring seeping water through a hole in one of the walls, and an old freight elevator shaft now filled in with rubble.

The one odd thing about the cellars, though, were the new-ish concrete pillars holding up a concrete ceiling. It wasn't until I researched old maps of Clifton Forge that I understood what was going on. Apparently, in an effort to gain more open space in the heart of downtown, the town cut a large building down to street level, and instead of filling in the cellars, a concrete slab was cast above them.

All in all, the Clifton Forge Underground strikes me as one of the coolest - and most unexpected - underground explorations in Virginia.

BACK