Spurlington Tunnel

The Spurlington Tunnel is a disused railroad tunnel through Muldraugh Hill near the community of Spurlington in Taylor County, Kentucky. The Kentucky Atlas & Gazetteer says it was finished around 1874 for the railroad and is now abandoned.^[1] Robert M. Rennick's notes, summarizing a 1992 local newspaper article, record that it was also called the Union Ridge Tunnel and the Muldraugh Hill Tunnel.^[2]

Construction

Published accounts date the work from 1 March 1867 to 1 July 1874, a span of more than seven years.^[3][4] A 2023 article by the Taylor Regional Archive Center gives the same 1867–1874 construction period.^[5] The tunnel was cut through blue limestone with a ledge of black flint. According to these accounts, a crew of about 75 men could advance only about six feet in a full 24-hour cycle.^[3][4] Local tradition, as recorded by Rennick, holds that it was dug entirely by hand.^[6]

The finished bore is usually given as about 1,900 feet long, with a roughly 100-foot vertical shaft near the middle to let locomotive exhaust escape.^[3][4] Rennick's notes also preserve a figure of 1,856 feet and describe the tunnel as running from Taylor County into Marion County.^[2]

Operation

The tunnel was on a line of about 30 miles between Lebanon and Greensburg, Kentucky.^[3] The Cumberland & Ohio completed this line in 1879, and the Louisville & Nashville later bought it at a foreclosure sale. It became the L&N's Greensburg branch.^[7] WKDQ reports that the first trains ran through the tunnel in October 1879, with four trains a day carrying passengers and freight.^[4] Spurlington itself was a station on the line.^[1]

Rennick's notes, citing a 1990 newspaper article, say the tunnel was enlarged in 1981 to 10 feet wide and 15 feet high as part of a program to upgrade the track between Lebanon and Campbellsville.^[2]

Abandonment and access

Freight service to Greensburg ended in 1979, and the last trains on the Lebanon–Campbellsville section ran in 1985.^[7] The Wells blog likewise dates the abandonment to the mid-1980s, more than a century after the first trains.^[3] Rennick's notes say the tracks were removed in 1991. By 1992, according to the same notes, the tunnel was being used as a local fallout shelter.^[2]

The tunnel had long been a local attraction. A 1974 newspaper account summarized by Rennick recalls that people would picnic on top of it.^[2] It is now on private property, so visitors need the owner's permission. The approach is roughly 300 yards over muddy ground strewn with fallen limestone.^[3]

Folklore

The tunnel is the setting of a well-known Kentucky legend about a witch named Nancy Bass and treasure supposedly buried by Jesse James's gang.^[4][8] Archival research suggests the real Nancy Bass died before the tunnel was begun.^[5] See Spurlington Tunnel witch legend.