EDITOR’S NOTE: Everyone has a story — some more well-known than others. Across Western North Carolina, so much history is buried below the surface. Six feet under. With this series, we introduce you to some of the people who have left marks big and small on this special place we call home.
Along the railroad tracks between Old Fort and Black Mountain lay an unknown number of bodies. In at least one location, an unmarked mass grave was constructed by prison guards to hide the deceased from public attention. In total, at least 139 mostly incarcerated African American men and some women died while building the Western North Carolina Railroad between 1877-1879. Over their dead bodies, Asheville opened to interstate commerce and tourism.
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The Western North Carolina Railroad
The 1840s were a turbulent time in America. Cultural strains over the looming slavery question threatened to tear the nation apart despite railroads connecting more Americans than ever.
In the Blue Ridge Mountains, cultural issues were a moot point in 1845 when a “total crop failure for mountain farms” caused a mass famine, according to the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Without a train track to wheel in rations, many starved.
After a decade of politicking, the residents of Western North Carolina successfully lobbied the state to build a railroad to prevent such a humanitarian crisis from happening again.
The Western North Carolina Railroad, as it came to be known, was mired in mismanagement from the start. By the outbreak of the American Civil War, tracks had only been laid as far as Salisbury. Union raids during the war, specifically those by Gen. George Stoneman, devastated the railroad.
After the Civil War, the state government was broke, having spent all its money on the war. But as Reconstruction ramped up, the railroad was a project that aligned with the federal government’s goals for rebuilding the South.
To get the WNCR chugging again, the state issued millions of dollars in bonds, according to NCpedia. But just as before, the railroad authorities, which were set up as a private company, were overrun with corruption.
Two men, George W. Swepson and Gen. Milton S. Littlefield, bought more than half of the bonds and used their stakeholder positions to funnel funds out of the company and into their wallets. Unsurprisingly, their corruption caused the railroad to run over budget and behind schedule.
After a decade of corruption, the state government had enough of Swepson and Littlefield and cut off the funding. N.W. Woodfin, of Asheville, was sent to collect the stolen funds. Apparently, Woodfin took his role so seriously he chased the railroad’s president to London.
In the 1870s, the state bought the railroad for $665,000, hoping to complete it.
While running for another term in Raleigh’s governor’s mansion in 1876, Zebulon Baird Vance campaigned to finish the railroad, no doubt in part because his primary home was in Asheville. His goods and those of his hometown would undoubtedly be more competitive with trains to tow them statewide and nationally rather than the slower and more expensive horse and buggy.
When reelected, Vance made good on his promise. Taking after other Southern states, the governor utilized convict labor to finish one of the most difficult construction projects of the era.
Vance would not see the railroad to completion while in office. His successor, Gov. Jarvis, oversaw the train hustling into Asheville. The connection across the border to Southeastern Tennessee would not be completed until 1894, half a century from when the project was first conceived.
Prisoners and railroads
Railroads built by prisoners were common for the time. So common, in fact, the practice received a term of its own, “chain gangs,” referring to the long lines of prisoners chained to each other while working.
Even today, prisoners are used as captive laborers, although they are often paid now. The Thirteenth Amendment has permitted involuntary employment of incarcerated individuals since ratification in 1865, reading, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
The same amendment that abolished slavery enshrined it for prisoners.
“In many ways, the convict leasing system was much more brutal than the slave labor system,” UNC Asheville professor Darin Waters told the Mountain Xpress. Slaveowners, the article’s writer explained, “viewed enslaved people as significant financial investments.” Convicts were seen as a cost-free solution and expendable option for labor.
Waters, who is the Deputy Secretary of the N.C. Office of Archives & History, told WUNC, “In many ways, states just revamped the slave codes and turned them into what is known now as the Black Codes.”
Black Codes, Waters explained, “was a way for states to continue to control the labor, especially of Black men. You could be convicted of being a vagrant, put into jail for X number of years, for something as simple as not being able to show that you were gainfully employed.”
These unjustly applied laws resulted in the incarcerated workforce on the WNCR being roughly 95 percent African American, some estimates are even higher. Of the roughly 3,000 individuals who worked on the 9-mile line between Old Fort and Black Mountain, at least 95 percent were incarcerated, “the majority of whom were unjustly imprisoned,” according to The RAIL Project.
“Seven-eighths of the convicts in North Carolina were predominantly Black men and some women, many were imprisoned due to petty crimes and exaggerated charges,” according to the National Park Service. “Some Black people were even randomly collected off of the street and charged with made up crimes to increase the railroad labor force … Like enslaved people of the previous decade, many of these convicts were leased to railroad companies and were likely formerly enslaved themselves.”
Despite extensive research by members of the RAIL Project, most of the names of the laborers on the WNCR are unknown. Of those that were listed in the 1880 Census, children as young as 14 and the elderly as old as 66 were forced to work laying steel tracks and moving boulders. Seven white men were among them, all other inmates were Black or of mixed descent.
From Old Fort to Asheville
As commanded by their captors, the prisoners laid 9.4 miles of rail between Henry Station near Old Fort to the summit of Ridgecrest Mountain. “This entire section of track became a graveyard,” reads a memorial at Andrew’s Geyser in Old Fort.
“Although the straight line distance between the two points is 3.4 miles, the tracks run 9.4 miles as they loop and climb over 1,000 feet,” according to the Commemorative Landscapes project by UNC.
The workers had no access to machinery, only their own muscles, hand tools and the first recorded use of nitroglycerin in the Southeastern United States for blasting through the mountains.
Such rudimentary tools were used in the construction because, “The state was broke, and they had some sledge hammers and some shovels and some saws, but the primary tool the convicts used was something they had to find on the ground — a flat rock,” Marion Mayor Steve Little told The Valley Echo.
“We did not treat these people as though they were human. We treated them worse than we treated the tools,” Little told Spectrum News. He has been researching the laborers of the WNCR since the early 1970s.
UNC Asheville history professor Dan Pierce told The Laurel of Asheville, “They worked six days a week in all weather under extremely dangerous conditions with mudslides and cave-ins a constant threat; were clothed in thin, cotton, striped uniforms with no coats; fed a meager diet of beans and cornbread; and were herded together in boxcars for sleeping which exposed them to communicable diseases.”
Prisoners were reportedly housed in boxcars and stockades during construction.
Deaths during construction were common, allegedly including diseases, cave collapses, explosion mishaps and guards shooting prisoners.
Estimates on the total death toll of the project are inconclusive. Like local historian Anne Chesky Smith, some say at least 450 died. Others prefer to stick to the official prison records of 139 deaths. Tracking down the true number and names of all who died for the cause is next to impossible given that it happened 150 years ago.
Residents of Western North Carolina were aware of how absurd building a railroad through the mountains was. The Asheville Weekly Citizen wrote on Oct. 17, 1878, “the Western North Carolina Railroad has been the heaviest railroad work in the State, but this passage of eight or nine miles through the mountain range is said by experts to be the most stupendous and difficult railroad building in North America.”
To say newspapers of the time were excited about the railroad would be a gross understatement. In the same issue, the Asheville Weekly Citizen reported, “Just think of it! What a future, indeed, is before our section! When all the above roads are finished, and we do sincerely believe they must be in the near future, giving easy and cheap access to every section, what an elyseum it will be for human suffering everywhere.”
On Dec. 19, 1879, the North Carolina Citizen reported “Through the Tunnel! The West and the East Now United!” The convicts had broken through the Swannanoa Gap, completing the longest of seven tunnels on the 9 miles of track between Old Fort and Black Mountain.
According to the article, then Gov. Thomas Jarvis halted the honorary processions on his tour of the tunnel “to visit the prisoner stockades, examine into their quarters, their mode of treatment, etc.” For what purpose the governor had for viewing the conditions of the incarcerated are not mentioned.
At the same time the WNCR was being built, a line from Charleston through Spartanburg was being finished. With these two trains and existing lines into Tennessee, Kentucky and Georgia, Asheville became the gateway to the lower Appalachian Mountains. Without this vital junction, Asheville would never have become the most powerful city in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Asheville was not the end of the line for long. By 1891, the WNCR had reached Murphy in the southwest corner of the state.
Asheville owes its success to the deadly work of the “chain gangs.” Without the use of incarcerated labor, the railroad would not have been completed for decades. Without the railroad, Western North Carolina would not have been opened for trade and tourism with the rest of the state and beyond.
In the decade after the railroad was completed, Asheville’s population quadrupled. The railroad put Asheville on the map.
“Swannanoa Tunnel”
As the longest of the seven tunnels, the Swannanoa Tunnel runs 1,832 feet long underneath Interstate 40, only a few yards short of lying beneath Ridgecrest Conference Center. Given the workers spent more time on that tunnel than any other part of the line, it is unsurprising that the most enduring memory of the project comes from that place.
As the workers worked, they sang songs to pass the time. Their legacy continues in the folk song “Swannanoa Tunnel.”
“Swannanoa Tunnel” is classified as a hammer song, according to Ballad of America. Hammer songs helped prisoners keep time with their fellow workers when doing jobs that required coordination such as hammering into rock. The most famous example of a hammer song is named for the titular “John Henry.”
“The tunneling work was difficult and dangerous,” explained Ballad of America. “Teams of two or three men drilled holes in the rock. A shaker held a steel drill bit against the rock while a hammer man landed blows on it. The shaker shook the rock and dust loose, and the hammer man struck again. Sometimes two hammer men alternated strikes. When the hole was deep enough, they tamped into it a mix of sawdust, cornmeal, and nitroglycerin. After igniting the mixture, they carried away the blasted rock and drilled a hole for another explosion.”
As with most folk songs, “Swannanoa Tunnel” was adopted and rewritten several times. White folk living in the area adapted the prisoner’s song into “Swannanoa Town,” which contains nearly the same lyrics except removes the context of the African American laborers. Another version recorded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford, of Mars Hill, seems to shift the lyrics to the perspective of a prison guard in his 1935 recording, notably including a racist verse about murdering the Black laborers. He removed the verse from subsequent recordings.
Unlike songs today, “Swannanoa Tunnel” lacks an agreed upon set of lyrics, especially since the laborers often improvised stanzas as they worked. Some words stuck, others did not.
Cecil Sharp, an English ethnomusicologist, traveled to lower Appalachia to discover what he believed to be the last remnant of traditional English folk music. Whether he was duped or dishonest is unclear, but when he wrote down “Swannanoa Town,” he claimed the song, along with “John Henry,” were originally English ballads. While the two songs may share some similarities to Old World ballads, hammer songs were a distinctly American creation by railroad chain gangs.
Sharp’s erroneous findings were published in his book “English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians” in 1917. As The Bitter Southerner pointed out, “Had he known the true source of ‘Swannanoa Town,’ he may not have even bothered to preserve it.” Despite the corrupted lyrics whitewashing the song’s African American origin, Sharp’s penmanship ironically is in no small part responsible for saving the song from entering obscurity.
Without Sharp, “Swannanoa Tunnel” may have survived only as a lumberjack song. Roscoe Holcomb, a folk singer from Eastern Kentucky, claimed to have heard the ballad from lumbermen from North Carolina.
Several recordings of “Swannanoa Tunnel” and the songs descended from it survive today. Click here to listen to some of the tracks in a playlist compiled by The Bitter Southerner.
Andrew’s Geyser
Slowly gaining popularity for passenger travel, the WNCR railway authorities decided to add a roadside attraction in 1885.
“Engineers dammed a mountain spring and laid a pipeline downhill to create the gravity-generated fountain, which, at its prime, could spew water 250 feet into the air,” wrote the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
The WNCR authorities already owned a mountain retreat in the Round Knob Hotel, which once accommodated guests along the train tracks between Black Mountain and Old Fort. In 1903, a fire broke out and leveled the hotel. Afterward, the area was vacated and neglected, allowing the geyser to fall into disrepair.
The land on which the hotel and geyser were constructed was no coincidence. The largest of the three stockades used to house the incarcerated railroad workers was roughly where the hotel once stood.
The geyser was restored and renamed in 1911 by New York banker George Fisher Baker who named the water feature for his friend, Alexander Boyd Andrews.
Andrew’s Geyser was rededicated by the town of Old Fort on May 6,1976.
The park surrounding the geyser is still accessible, however, the geyser has not been operational for several years.
Today, the area serves as a recreational zone and a memorial dedicated to “the incarcerated railroad workers who built the Mountain Division of the Western North Carolina Railroad,” the monument reads. On the reverse side of the marker is a list of the 139 known deaths attributed to the railroad’s construction.
The RAIL Project
A joint effort between professors and politicians, the RAIL Project, which is a condensed version of their full title, “The Railroad and Incarcerated Laborer Memorial Project,” is a consortium dedicated to uncovering the atrocities associated with the WNCR and memorialize the laborers who suffered to build it.
Prominent board members of the RAIL Project include UNC Asheville professor Dr. Dan Pierce, Wilma Dykeman’s son Jim Stokely, local historian Anne Chesky Smith and Marion Mayor Steve Little.
Combined, their efforts to remember the victims have proven fruitful, having successfully constructed two monuments, one at Andrew’s Geyser near Old Fort and one in Ridgecrest near Black Mountain.
Like the marker at Andrew’s Geyser, the placement of the Ridgecrest monument is intentional.
In 2021, the RAIL Project employed cadaver dogs and ground-penetrating radar to search for a long-theorized mass grave along Yates Avenue. While excavations were never conducted to confirm the number of bodies there, the dogs and radar successfully identified the graveyard. Today, the area is gated off to the public, but the marker memorializing the location is approachable from the road.
The men buried in the Ridgecrest mass grave are most likely the victims of a cave-in described in an oral tradition. Little explained, “right there was a rumbling sound, just as the Salisbury locomotive was backing in with empty cars to be filled with rocks,” he told The Valley Echo. “A rumble, and then a quick crash. Rock fell in, and approximately 19 convicts and one guard were crushed to death.”
This event was recorded in some iterations of the “Swannanoa Tunnel” folk song. The singer cries out “Swannanoa Tunnel, Asheville Junction, All caved-in, baby, All caved-in.”
While this gravesite is known, at least 100 more convicts are unaccounted for. Members of the RAIL Project hope to one day unearth the forgotten final resting places of all convict laborers along the tracks.
Norfolk Southern and the state of the railroad
In 1975, passenger travel through the Swannanoa Tunnel ceased. The only way to reach the tunnel today is to walk, which could be dangerous because of train activity.
The sign for the Swannanoa Tunnel on the Yates Avenue overpass above Interstate 40 in Ridgecrest erroneously states the west entrance of the tunnel is “300 yds. S.E.” The west entrance is roughly 300 yards west-southwest of the marker at 35°37’17″N 82°16’19″W. The east entrance is at 35°37’24″N 82°16’01″W.
For some time now, Norfolk Southern has operated the railway that includes the mountainous stretch between Old Fort and Asheville.
The clickity-clacking sound of trains running through Old Fort, Black Mountain, Swannanoa and Asheville has been noticeably absent as of late. Portions of the line through the Swannanoa Gap were badly damaged in the floodwaters of Tropical Storm Helene. In at least one place, the track hangs in the air without the ground beneath that once supported it, washed out by the roaring currents that reshaped the landscape and lives of the residents of several states. It is unclear when the railroad will be operational again.