Appalachian History

“John Henry was hammering on the right side,
The big steam drill on the left,

Before that steam drill could beat him down,

He hammered his fool self to death.”

---stanza 7 from one of the earliest written copies of the John Henry ballad,
prepared by a W. T. Blankenship and published about 1900.

He’s an American folk hero, the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, and novels. The legend of John Henry began in Big Bend Tunnel, in Summers County, WV, which CSX Railroad still uses today. He was the best steel-drivin' man to ever grace the mountains of West Virginia, say the songs, working on the largest tunneling project in American history at the time.

That John Henry lived seems beyond doubt. That he drove steel in Great Bend Tunnel (as it was then called) in the early 1870's seems certain. That he drove steel against a steam drill and beat it seems likely. That he died from over exertion in the contest seems somewhat less likely, if eyewitnesses are to be believed.

In 1972, Michigan sculptor Charles Cooper completed this eight-foot bronze statue of John Henry. It stands in Memorial Park above the east portal of the Big Bend Tunnel near Talcott, West Virginia.

Mrs. C.L. Lynn of Rome, GA, sent her copy of the Blankenship songsheet quoted above to Guy B. Johnson, of the University of North Carolina, in the mid 1920s when he was collecting research for his forthcoming “John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend.“ Johnson’s 1929 work was the first published book-length study of John Henry and the John Henry legend.

Johnson spent four days in Talcott, WV in June 1927 interviewing still-living men who were likely to have seen the event with their own eyes. Mr. C.S. (Neal) Miller told him "Now some people say John Henry died because of this test. But he didn't. At least, he didn't drop dead. As well as I remember, though, he took sick and died from fever soon after that.

"I came here when I was seventeen," said Mr. Miller, "It was the spring of 1869. In the fall of that year I began work at Big Bend. I carried water and steel for the gang of drivers at the east end. I would take the drills to the shop and bring them back after they were sharpened. I often saw John Henry, as he was on the gang that I carried water and drills for.”

John Henry ballad version by W.T. Blankenship, about 1900.

Folk historian Dr. Louis Chappell of West Virginia University had also interviewed Miller about the John Henry story, two years earlier. But his book, “John Henry, a Folk Lore Study,” didn’t make it to press till 1933. Neal Miller had told Chappell, "he didn't die from getting too hot in the contest . . . The boys around the tunnel told me he was later killed in the tunnel . . ." And a D.R. Gilpin said, "The last time I saw John Henry was when some rocks from a blast fell on him. I always thought he died in the tunnel."

Now, Guy Johnson was a highly respected scholar who had co-authored several works on African American song, but a bit of controversy surrounds his work with John Henry, as Chappell was quick to point out.

According to Chappell, Johnson at first thought that the character of John Henry was totally mythological, and that he may have hailed from Georgia or the Carolinas. After Chappell's work began to circulate in unpublished form, prior to 1929, Johnson took up Chappell's position for his study, without crediting Chappell.

Many rare book collectors today feel Chappell produced the superior work, which easily brings $250 a copy in the rare book market. Chappell's work was much more thorough than Johnson's, drawing on many contemporary newspapers, scientific journals, treatises on tunneling, and reports from the construction of other tunnels, as well as on the oral and written reports from his many informants. Chappell wrote with more conviction than Johnson about the certainty that John Henry was a real person and not just a legend.


sources: John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend, by Guy Benton Johnson. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1929)
John Henry, A Folk-Lore Study, by Louis W. Chappell, (Jena, Germany: Frommannsche Verlag, Walter Biedermann, 1933)
www.abaa.org/books/abaa/news_fly?code=49
www.americanfolklore.net/folktales/wv2.html
www.ibiblio.org/john_henry
www.threeriverswv.com/legend-of-john-henry.php
www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1963/6/1963_6_34.shtml



John+Henry Talcott+WV Big+Bend+Tunnel railroad+workers appalachia appalachia+history appalachian+history

"One time we were hauling long timbers for the railroad company. 30 ft. long and it required 2 cars to haul the timbers on, a car under each end and it was pulled with 2 mules, one in front of the other which was called a double team.

"I myself was driving one of the double teams and a fellow by the name of Keene Lancaster was driving a single team just in front of me. We had quite a hill to go down about one fourth of a mile long and where the trainroad started off the hill, it went over a wood trestle and it was about 200 yards long from where it started at the top of the hill until it came to the lower end of the trestle.

"The trestle was 35 feet high in the highest part. It was a gradual slant to the lower end of the trestle and as we were on our way to the station at Monica with six loaded cars of railroad timbers and as said before, there was one single car in front of me and four cars behind me and when we started down the hill, the car in front of me, I waited at the top of the hill for him to get to the lower end of the trestle before I started down the hill.

"It was late in the fall, about the middle of November, and it had fell quite a frost the night before and there was quite a bit of frost on the track, and we had brakes on the front and rear cars of their double cars and when I started down the hill I got a cousin of mine at the top of the hill to brake the rear car down the hill.

"The fellow on the next car behind me was Derben’s double car load and when I started down before him I said to him, 'Allen, you had better wait at the top of the hill until I get down, and I will come back and brake your rear car down the hill for you.'

"But instead of waiting, he turned over the hill just behind me, and I saw he wasn’t going to hold his cars with only one brake and I knew if I didn’t get out of his way, he would run into me about the middle of the bridge, and I whipped my team up and let up on my brake, and before I got down the hill my mules was in a long lope.

"As soon as I got to the lower end of the bridge, I jumped off my car and whipped my mules out of the track and as the hook that the stretchers was hooked to was turned sideways and the stretchers came loose from the cars and my mules just trotted out in the field.

"When Derben saw he couldn’t hold his cars with only one brake, when he got to the other end of the bridge, he jumped off the cars and turned the cars loose on the mules. When the cars got to the highest part of the bridge, it punched the mules off the bridge and they fell 35 feet to the ground.

This photo is not from Wolfe County, KY where this accident took place; it’s from Nacogdoches County, Texas. But it approximates the scene of sawed logs brought to a railroad siding by mule teams described in this story. Photo by John Vachon.

"It broke the wheel mule’s back, and throwed the lead mule way up on the hillside and hurt it very bad. It trotted out in the bottom and went to picking grass, but the other mule was never able to get up. It had to be killed, and some of the mules didn’t jerk the heavy loaded cars off the track and they came down and rammed into the rear end of my cars and the two heavy loaded cars rammed into the rear end of the cars ahead of my cars.

"The fellow that was driving the front car just had got off to open a gate when the cars hit his car and he didn’t have time to get the gate open, and it rammed the car, mule and all through the gate, and then they started down a small hill and about 40 yards ahead there was another gate, and then it rammed the front cars and the old mule thru the other gate. By that time myself and the driver of the car behind Derben’s car jumped on the cars and broke them down and got them stopped at the foot of the little hill.

"The company was notified and they sent some men to kill the wounded mule and take it off and bury it. Then we coupled the 2 cars together and hitched 3 mules to the double cars and we hitched the mule that wasn’t killed in front of my 2 mules and pulled them to the station and unloaded them, and drove back to camp and eat our dinner."


Daniel Boone Childers (1873-1956)
born in Wolfe County, KY, on Holly Creek
source: www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kywolfe/childers.htm



railroad+workers railroad+accidents Wolfe+County+KY appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

During the early decades of the 20th century, hundreds of short-line railroad existed across the nation, and most all were regarded by the local people as their railroad. There was something appealing about the character of a little railroad that was trying to complete with the big lines, and usually the short line's tiny locomotives and makeshift equipment had a certain flavor to them that set them apart from the uniform look of the big railroad lines.

The Kanawha, Glen Jean & Eastern Railway was no exception. The average citizen between Glen Jean and Mt Hope, WV came to be able to identify the engineer on the KGJ&E train even before the train came in sight just by way the train's operator blew the train's whistle. Before long, most of the people of the era came to refer to "their" short line railroad on a first-name basis, simply referring to the line as the "KG." The man who owned the line (William McKell) was usually referred to as Bill, and rarely called William.

With the start of the Great Depression, the KGJ&E was adversely affected, as were the majority of the railroad across the nation. Although the railroad continued to do a good business, the times called for tight money policies by the railroad's management. As the years of the 1930's ground by, there never seemed to be enough money available for the railroad to purchase new locomotives to replace its aging fleet.

As a result, the line's locomotives, built during the early years of the century, were very nearly the end of their useful life by the end of the 1930's. A veteran engineer of the KGJ&E once commented, "One of our locomotives looked so old compared to the C&O and VGN locomotives, some people probably thought it had been built during the Civil War!"

The company able repairmen of McKell’s combination railroad and mining equipment repair shops, in Kilsyth, WV, kept the KG's old steam-breathing beasts going, until the very last moment of the line's existence. There, refinements were added to the KGJ&E locomotives, such as small metal houses, nicknamed "dog houses," that were attached to the rear of the tenders of the KGJ&E locomotives. These tiny enclosures gave the KG's head brakeman a way to escape the cold rains and snows common during the winter months. The KGJ&E locomotives were rarely turned around, so on return trips from Pax, WV, the head-brakeman kept watch from the "dog house" while the engine crew backed the engine over the road to Mount Hope.

The modernization of the KGJ&E equipment never came. In 1939, William McKell died, and in 1940, the C&O rushed to buy the KGJ&E, and at the same time, the New River Company (a company half-owned by the C&O) bought the coal properties of the McKell Coal & Coke Company. Within a few years, the C&O had ripped up much of the KGJ&E tracks between Glen Jean and Mount Hope, but merged its own tracks with most of the short line's remaining sections.

The KG's mining and railroad repair shops in Kilsyth were gradually phased out of existence, primarily because the C&O maintained a complete railroad shop in Thurmond and the New River Company maintained a repair shop in Mount Hope. The KGJ&E Depot in Mount Hope was torn down sometime during the years of World War II.

Source: www.wva-usa.com/history/mthope/kgje.php


Kanawha+Glen+Jean+and+Eastern+Railway Mt+Hope+WV appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history railroad+workers

Before railroad work was completely mechanized in the 1950s, railroad calls were an everyday part of the track worker's ritual. Most of these gandy dancers—the label applied to railway line workers who maintained railroad tracks and kept the rails straight—were African Americans who adapted the work call to railroad work. The term is said to be from the dance-like movements of the spikedriver, plus the name of Chicago-based Gandy Manufacturing Company, who supplied tracklining tools.

The physical movements of these railroad crew members were synchronized by a caller who sang the chants, ensuring safety and pacing while spiritually uplifting the men at their toil. Teams of eight to 14 men worked together to lay or care for the tracks. They had a rich repertoire of songs used for the many tasks required of them. Called lining track songs, these hollers are closely related to shanties. In the poetic words of folklorist Alan Lomax, the songs "sounded so wild and sweet that the mockingbirds in the nearby bushes stopped to listen, [as the] railroad moved into the Southern wilderness."

Apparently women worked at track lining as well as men. There is a verse in one of the lining track songs that goes "Y'oughta been on the Brazos, 19-and-10, Buddy Russell drove the women like he drove the men."

Since the caller was never sure when the call had to stop, there was generally no narrative logic to the sequence of his calls. This transcribed lining track song verse, for example, recalls a biblical figure and is followed by several about present day women:

If I could I surely would,
Stand on the rock where Moses stood.
If I could (rap it, rap it!)
I surely would, Stand on the rock,
Where Moses stood.

I don't know but I've been told,
Susie had a jelly roll.
I don't know
But I've been told,
That Susie had,
A jelly roll.

Ida Red and Ida Blue,
got a gal named Ida too.
Oh boys over yonder (6 x)

Bluegrass legend Jimmie Rodgers picked up guitar, yodeling and much of the Negro country blues style from gandy dancers.

Sometimes Aaron Rodgers took his son with him out to the tracks and put him to work bringing water to the black work crews who repaired worn ties and damaged rails, cleared brush, and shoveled gravel ballast.

The foreman sent along a command to a "caller," who configured this order into cadences similar to what you might hear from a drillmaster. "If you really wanted to move that track, you made a sexy call," a former gandy dancer named Cornelius Wright told the cultural researcher Maggie Holtzberg-Call. "And they had the language for it. Some callers would talk about the lingerie that a woman wore. Now that caused the crew to really shift that track."
---"In the Country of Country:People and Places in American Music"

sources: www.familytreemagazine.com/articles/oct03/railroad.html
www.folklib.net/folkfile/l.shtml
bluegrassmessengers.com/master/idared1.html
"In the Country of Country:People and Places in American Music" by Nichoas Dawidoff, Vintage, 1998
"Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination" by Jack Temple Kirby, Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986


appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history gandy+dancers railroad+workers