I added a paragraph to this section before taking a hiatus from wikipedia editing to attend to personal business (especially since wikipedia's source editing has become weird these past to days, like not having a box for a section title here when I started by clicking "new section"). I write here because even with this reference I could not add an explicit mention of what I found researching U.S. census records re slaveholdings of several politicians on the route: this created an agricultural market for slaves. Slaveholdings in northwest Virginia decreased as farmers invested capital in machinery, etc. I'm not saying there was no investment in machinery, because clearly the railroad itself was capital investment, but I've seen several census entries for Lynchburg and points south on this route that not only did the slaveholdings grow for various politicians on this route, their slaves in 1860 were not 10 year older versions of the 1850 slaves, as was the case in other mountain or even Piedmont counties. It's been a while since I read a book about Maryland and perhaps Virginia Tidewater planters changing their "crop" mix to exporting humans as tobacco depleted the soils. Perhaps I'll be able to find a more explicit reference to Lynchburg's growth as a slavetrading center when local history collections open again. Else someone else can do the original research. LOL.Jweaver28 (talk) 17:11, 20 September 2020 (UTC)Jweaver28 (talk) 17:14, 20 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
