Etched in stone
RAIL Memorial honors incarcerated African American laborers who conquered the Swannanoa Gap
Fred McCormick
The Valley Echo
October 15, 2021
A stone marker recognizing the incarcerated laborers who built the railroad through the Swannanoa Gap will be dedicated during an Oct. 17 ceremony at Andrews Geyser in Old Fort. Photo by Fred McCormick
The nearly constant silence that emanates from the park around Andrews Geyser, just down the mountain in Old Fort, is representative of a significant time in the site’s history. It is one that’s tragic, and rarely told.
The serenity there is occasionally pierced by the sound of a railroad engine, as it barrels along the nearby tracks preparing to navigate the steep climb into the mountains above, a feat only possible due to the bodies that likely lie nearby.
It’s been nearly 150 years since thousands of incarcerated laborers, the vast majority of whom were African American, performed the brutal task of building an engineering marvel that brought the outside world to the mountains of Western North Carolina, and the 3:30 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 17 dedication of a new stone marker will finally recognize their work.
The Railroad and Incarcerated Laborer Memorial Project formed in 2020, after UNC Asheville history professor Dr. Dan Pierce and City of Marion Mayor Steve Little met on Pierce’s porch in Ridgecrest. They spoke less than a mile from the western portal of the Swannanoa Tunnel, a 1,832-foot hole through the mountain that was completed at the cost of around 120 of the lives of the men who blasted it.
Pierce wanted to figure out a way to recognize the 3,000 workers, and the unknown number of them who died during the construction of the seven tunnels and roughly nine miles of railroad track.
“This was probably the most important infrastructure project in the history of Western North Carolina,” Pierce said. “It transformed the region, and the people who were truly responsible for it have never been properly acknowledged.”
Pierce and Little formed the RAIL Project, which is led by an 11-member steering committee, consisting of Old Fort Police Chief Melvin Lytle; UNCA Police Chief Eric Boyce; President of the McDowell County NAACP Ray McKesson; Old Fort Mountain Gateway Museum Director RoAnn Bishop; UNCA Archivist and Special Collections Assistant Ashley McGee Whittle; Wilma Dykeman Legacy President Jim Stokely WNC Historical Association Director Anne Chesky Smith; N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Regional Supervisor Jeff Futch and Deputy Secretary of the Office of Archives and History for the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources Darin Waters.
The committee raised over $15,000 for a stone marker recognizing the incarcerated laborers. The Rail Project selected stonemason and longtime Old Fort resident, Paul Twitty, to design and build the memorial.
The west-facing side of a stone memorial at Andrews Geyser in Old Fort includes some of the names of the incarcerated laborers who built the seven tunnels and 9.4 miles of railroad track that brought widespread access to Western North Carolina. Photo by Fred McCormick
“I was proud to do this,” said Twitty, who has lived in Old Fort since 1966. “It felt like a privilege to be able to build this monument to honor the people who built that railroad.”
Twitty, who began doing stone work with his father and uncle as a child, worked on the memorial with Jimmy Logan.
“I wanted to build something that matched the mountains,” he said. “So, we used real river rock, and turned them sideways so the larger sides of the rocks could be seen.”
Twitty incorporated railroad spikes into the design as a nod to the tracks nearby.
“I wanted to do the best I could do on this memorial,” said the semi-retired stonemason. “This felt like something I was supposed to do, and I thank God for giving me the strength to do it.”
Twitty, who is African American, had long been familiar with the history of the railroad tracks through the Swannanoa Gap.
“A lot of those prisoners died building those tunnels and tracks,” he said. “Those men are gone now, but history is finally remembering them.”
The location of the marker, once home to the famed Round Knob Hotel until it burned to the ground in 1903, is significant, according to Pierce.
“We discovered, through Steve Little’s research, a map in the state archives that depicts the Round Knob Stockade, which was the largest of the stockades where they kept the laborers locked up,” Pierce said. “That site is just a little to the west, right in the bend of the railroad track.”
The harsh conditions of the camps resulted in the deaths of hundreds of laborers, he added.
“We don’t know how many, but there are bodies of people who died of disease or during the process of building the railroad buried around this site,” Pierce said. “We thought this was the perfect place to recognize these laborers.”
The west side of the memorial is inscribed with some of the names of the prisoners confirmed to have worked on the construction of the railroad.
Sunday’s ceremony will be led by McKesson, who will introduce the people involved in making the memorial a reality. The event will feature a detailed history of the railroad construction, and Warren Wilson College professors, Kevin Kehrberg and Jeffrey A. Keith, authors of The Bitter Southerner article, Somebody Died, Babe, will discuss the origins of the song, Swannanoa Tunnel.
Guests are invited to bring lawn chairs to watch the dedication ceremony.
The RAIL Project will continue to work to bring awareness to the incarcerated laborers who built the railroad that conquered the Swannanoa Gap, and plans to install wayside markers in Old Fort and Ridgecrest.
“We would like to eventually positively confirm the location of graves,” Pierce said. “It may be impossible, but it would be nice to finally mark those graves.”