Steel rails curve into shadow beneath towering strata of bare Appalachian limestone, the ancient rock face scored by millennia of folding into dramatic diagonal bands of grey and white — this is Iron Gate Gorge, one of the most photographed natural spectacles along the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway's mountain passage near Clifton Forge, Virginia, circa 1907. A lone log cabin sentinel stands to the right of the tracks, telegraph poles march into the dark treeline on the left, and the gorge walls rise so steeply they nearly close the sky. Hand-colored in the vivid, slightly unrealistic palette of the early postcard golden age, the image conveys both the rugged grandeur and the industrial ambition threading through Virginia's Allegheny highlands at the dawn of the automobile age. Postmarked Washington, D.C., June 20, 1907 (Station R), with a receiving mark from what appears to be Poolesville, Maryland, the card was addressed to a Mrs. H. S. Beall of Poolesville — a small agricultural community north of Washington that received its mail via the C&O Canal corridor.