Rob Neufeld

Visiting Our Past

“Too many convicts,” thought Jacob Allen, president of the North Carolina State Penitentiary board in 1874, as he reviewed the prisons. There was an “urgent necessity to find employment for this surplus.”

Incarceration and rehabilitation had replaced corporal punishment as ways to address crime, so there was a need to do something with the manpower under the guise of rehabilitation, and that was hard labor. Seven-eighths of the convicts were African-American.

The convict labor system was “Slavery by Another Name,” as Nancy O’Brien Wagner calls it on her PBS webpage with that name. New laws made it easy to pick up any black youth along the road and put him in prison.

“Pig laws,” Wagner notes, “made the theft of a farm animal worth a dollar punishable by as much as five years in jail. Vagrancy statutes made it a crime not to have a job or be able to show proof of employment.”

In 1875, the state purchased the Western North Carolina Railroad and on Feb. 19, 1877, the legislature authorized the enlistment of “not less than five hundred convicts,” none of whom had been convicted of violent crimes. “The costs of keeping these creatures (the convicts) is greater (in the Raleigh penitentiary) than in the mountains,” the railroad commissioners reported.

North Carolina put its prisoners on chain gangs under heavy guard to avoid the expense of arduous state projects, such as the building of railroads and blasting of paths. After being fed supper, journalist Rebecca Harding Davis reported, the convicts, “were driven into a row of prison cars, where they were tightly boxed in for the night, with no possible chance to obtain either light or air.”

James W. Wilson, contractor for the excavation of the Swannanoa Tunnel, told the General Assembly that the actual cost of the work (not counting the value of labor) was thirty cents a day — seven cents for the feeding of the prisoners, ten cents for the guarding, and the rest for miscellaneous care.

Wilson was an old hand at the business. He had been the railroad company engineer and superintendent during the Civil War. At the time of his winning the contract for the Swannanoa Tunnel, he was also the state’s chief engineer, the president of the railroad, and a major stockholder.

The Swannanoa Tunnel — the system’s longest at 1,822 feet — has become the stuff of legend. Mountain society had been forever altered by the arrival of the inaugural train in 1879 as “convicts pulled the seventeen ton ‘Salisbury’ … to tracks on the western side by dragging three ropes, laying track in front and removing track from behind as they traveled along the stagecoach road.”

Remembrance

In the laying of track throughout Western North Carolina, 139 convicts died in cave-ins and mudslides, from disease and through the prosecution of escapes. There was a one in 10 chance you’d be killed on the job if you had been one of those workers.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s song, “Swannanoa Tunnel,” cries, “When you hear that hoot owl squallin’/ Somebody’s dyin’, babe, somebody's dyin.’”

North Carolina’s report on the Swannanoa Tunnel attests to 23 convict deaths there.

“The Road,” John Ehle’s novel about the epic and tragic venture, features convict laborers, mountain residents, the mountain itself, and a character named Weatherby Wright, based on James Wilson. The company president and engineer undergoes a physical and mental weakening as his ethics cave in to progress and his nature yields to an obsession.

After the railroad had suffered losses, Weatherby had given his laborers a pep talk: “This is your big chance to make your lives into a monument.”

Three years after the Swannanoa cave-in, 19 African-American convict workers drowned, chained together, while crossing the Tuckaseegee River to work on the Cowee Tunnel. They ranged in age from 15 to 52, and had been arrested for such crimes as stealing a chicken.

On the morning of Dec. 30, 1882, they boarded the large flat-bottomed boat that ferried them. Dave Tabor relates what happened next on his history website, Appalachianhistory.net.

“It had rained the night before and the bottom of the boat contained a sludge of ice and rain water. As the boat moved into the river, the trapped water flowed into the stern of the flatboat, frightening several convicts and causing them to shout that the boat was sinking. As a result, the prisoners panicked and rushed to the front of the boat,” and the boat capsized.

“Since the convicts were shackled and chained together, they became a tangled mass, locked in a deadly embrace.”

The Tuckaseegee tragedy became the focus of much attention in Sylva in 2013 when Gary Carden’s monthly story-telling program, “Liar’s Bench,” dwelled on the history; and in 2012 with the PBS documentary, “Slavery by Another Name,” based on the book by Douglas Blackmon.

Carden and storyteller Dave Waldrop, looking for the convicts’ gravesites, “tracked down longtime resident Ellen Sutton, whose property overlooks the tunnel,” Garret K. Woodward reported in “Smoky Mountain News,” June 19, 2013.

“She told them that the bodies weren’t buried above the tunnel (as supposed). Rather, the 19 convicts were placed in mass graves on a ridge behind what is now the Jackson County Green Energy Park.”

One day, Dennis Wilkey, whose property abuts the site, took Carden and Waldrop up the ridge. “Dennis cut us a path and finally showed us the spot where they were buried,” Carden said. “He said that’s where his daddy had showed him they were, which was some 60 years ago.”

Later, Woodward related, Carden brought dowser Tom Stewart, who detected three large graves, each thought to hold several bodies.

Matt Bumgarner, author of books on the history of railroads in Western North Carolina, has published the names of the 19 who’d drowned. All were from the Piedmont and eastern parts of the state except for James Fisher, age 18, from Polk County.

James had been one year old when the Civil War had ended, and 13 when the federal government had pulled out its Reconstruction troops. He became a man during the virulent, post-Reconstruction backlash against African-American freedom; and during the prodigious advent of railroads.

The railroad made America modern; and extended the leisure class. It had a brutal cost.

Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website, “The Read on WNC.” Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler; email him at RNeufeld@charter.net; call 828-505-1973.