The Great Bore
A Souvenir Of The Hoosac Tunnel

I— HILL. 12 engineering in this country. Next to Mont Cenis, it is the longest tunnel in the world. It is excavated to a height of twenty feet and a width of twenty- four feet through nearly five miles of granite-like mica slate. Two million tons of rock have been blasted out of it by 500,000 pounds of tri-nitro- glycerine. Thirty million brick arch it for more than a third of its length. And over it is a mountain whose lowest point is 800 feet above its roof and whose highest elevation towers more than 1,700 feet into the air. The Hoosac tunnel was first proposed for a canal in 1819, the object being to open a direct line of communication between Boston and the west. Six years later the legislature of Massachusetts took up the problem. It appointed a board of commission- ers, with Engineer Laomi Baldwin at its head, to ascertain the practicability of making a canal from Boston to the Hudson river and through the Hoosac mountain. The commissioners examined the coun- try by way of Worcester, Springfield and the West- field river, and also by Fitchburg and the Miller and Deerfield rivers, making North Adams a point com- mon to both routes. They decided in favor of the Deerfield and Hoosac river route, over which Engi- neer Baldwin, it is said, was so enthusiastic that he exclaimed, “It seems as if the finger of Providence