Beneath the brutal beauty of the Swannanoa Gap

RAIL Memorial Project to mark mass grave in Ridgecrest, install historical markers and host Symposium at UNC Asheville

Fred McCormick
The Valley Echo
February 28, 2023

The beauty of the Swannanoa Gap, which separates Old Fort and Ridgecrest, hides the brutal history of the construction of the Mountain Division of the WNC Railroad, but the RAIL Memorial Project continues to highlight the story of the incarcerated laborers who built the engineering marvel. Photo by Kendra Payne

The rolling mountain landscape and lush vegetation that fill the Swannanoa Gap, which rises into the Blue Ridge from Old Fort to Ridgecrest, cast endless shadows across the ground below, creating a haunting metaphor around the stories it holds. While historical accounts of the engineering marvel that brought the modern world up the gorge into Western North Carolina nearly 150 years ago have long celebrated the feat itself, the long-held narrative of the Mountain Division of the WNC Railroad obscured the thousands of mostly African-American laborers forced to build it.

The historical winds began to shift in 2020, when UNC Asheville history professor Dr. Dan Pierce and City of Marion Mayor Steve Little organized a group of volunteers from Buncombe and McDowell Counties to establish the Railroad and Incarcerated Laborer (RAIL) Memorial Project, an effort to recognize the unwilling sacrifice of the prisoners who endured brutal conditions in the name of progress.

What started as a humble initiative, however, quickly expanded into a mission to memorialize the unknown number of inmates, some of whom were as young as 14 years old, killed and buried near the tracks that twist 1,100 feet up the mountain pass. The nonprofit organization’s work, which includes identifying probable grave sites in both counties, will culminate this spring with the installation of a stone marker and historical panels in Ridgecrest, and the RAIL Symposium, hosted by UNC Asheville, Thursday, March 30 - Saturday, April 1.

The symposium, which is free and open to the public, requires attendees to register on eventbrite.com. The three-day presentation will open with a keynote address by Dr. Darin Waters, the Deputy Secretary of the N.C. Office of Archives and History and founding member of the RAIL Memorial board, followed by a reception. The Mountain View Room in the Kimmel Arena will host several guest speakers Friday, March 31, while four field outings, including sessions in Old Fort and along the Point Lookout Trail, will be offered the final day.

The RAIL Symposium, hosted by UNC Asheville, March 30 - April 1, will offer an in-depth look at the work of the RAIL Memorial Project.

The conference, according to Pierce, will provide an in-depth examination of the RAIL Project’s findings and feature panelists and presenters from various WNC institutions who supported the research.

“Our original goal was to put up a memorial at Andrew’s Geyser, which we were able to do, thanks to the generous support of so many people,” said Pierce, a resident of Ridgecrest. “Of course, one thing led to another and we ended doing so much more. This really did get so much bigger than any of us imagined.”

It took a little more than a year for the RAIL Memorial Project to raise funding to construct and install a stone marker at Andrew’s Geyser, near the former site of the Round Knob Stockade, which housed prison laborers in the years following the Civil War. The marker, which features river rocks surrounding a granite slab engraved with the story of the workers who built the Mountain Division of the WNC Railroad on one side, and names of laborers uncovered through census records, was dedicated in October of 2021.

Those familiar with the history of the 9.4 miles of tracks between Old Fort and Ridgecrest, including WNC Historical Association Executive Director Anne Chesky Smith, knew there were likely bodies buried in unmarked graves nearby.

“Right after we got the memorial up, Anne connected with Blair Tormey, of Western Carolina University, who specializes in using ground-penetrating radar (GPR),” Pierce said. “Blair connected the RAIL Project with Paul Martin Archaeology Consultants, a Tennessee-based organization that specializes in the use of canines for human remains detection.

Teams conducted a pair of searches for possible grave sites in 2022, before focusing their efforts on a privately owned piece of property near the 1,832-foot long Swannanoa Tunnel in Ridgecrest.

“That was the most important search,” Pierce said. "The dog had alerted in that area a number of times in a previous search, and Ridgecrest (Conference Center) was helpful in clearing out some of the brush covering the area.”

The access allowed Tormey and his crews to bring GPR equipment into the site, which had long been rumored to hold remains of railroad laborers.

“Years ago, a woman whose family had lived in Ridgecrest for many years knew of Steve Little’s interest in the history of the railroad,” Pierce continued. “She showed him what she had been told was a convict graveyard as a child. She said she would walk through area with her parents and they always pointed it out.”

A stone marker near Andrew’s Geyser in Old Fort was dedicated by the RAIL Memorial Project in October of 2021. The nonprofit organization will install a memorial and historical panels in Ridgecrest in 2023. Photo by Fred McCormick

The group found indications of a trench beneath the surface.

“It’s not conclusive, and we have no intentions of disturbing possible graves, but based on the oral history and the fact that the area is very close to a former stockade where an influenza outbreak killed a number of people, we feel like it’s a logical spot for a mass burial site,” Pierce said.

With excavation ruled out, there was a natural next step for the RAIL Project.

“We wanted to create a memorial for the dead,” Pierce said. “The one at Andrew’s Geyser is for the workers, in general, but we thought it was important to have one specifically for the dead.”

At least 139 people perished in accidents during the construction of the seven tunnels blasted through mountains between Old Fort and Ridgecrest, but the number of inmates who died from malnutrition, exposure to the elements or the spread of diseases has been estimated to be approximately 300. A precise record of the remains of those buried in the Swannanoa Gap may never be known, according to Pierce.

A monument for all of them, however, will be installed this summer on Yates Avenue, near the undisclosed grave site.

“We now possess a two-ton boulder, which is indicative of the work many of these laborers did, and in some cases how they died,” Pierce said. “We will be placing a bronze memorial plaque on fop of it, and Ridgecrest is helping us prepare the site.”

Nearby, three historical panels, funded through a grant from the Community Foundation of WNC and designed by Chesky Smith, will preserve what had long been an unrecognized history. The installation will include information on the former Ridgecrest stockade, the Swannanoa Tunnel and the roughly 3,000 inmates who built it.

For the history professor and native of the region, who initially partnered with his longtime friend, Little, to bring awareness to the incarcerated laborers forced to endure treacherous conditions daily to bring economic development to WNC, the response to the RAIL Memorial Project has been gratifying.

“We have a great group of people on our board, and they’ve willingly given a variety of gifts and skills,” Pierce said. “It’s easy in the current environment to be negative about things, but this experience, with the support, funding and just good will we’ve received, has just been tremendous.'“