The railroad came here through the sacrifice of convicts
by Rob Neufeld
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 and execution as means of addressing crime. Seven-eighths of the convicts were African-American.
The solution: put the prisoners to work under heavy guard on expensive and arduous state projects, the most obvious one at the time being railroad building. Twice previously, state-aided private companies had attempted to breach the mountains with rails. The Civil War and then corporate embezzlement had gutted the efforts.
In 1875, the state purchased the Western North Carolina Railroad; and on February 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.
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 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.”
139 convicts died on western North Carolina projects—in cave-ins and mudslides, and from disease and prosecution of escapes. Bascom Lamar Lunsford wrote a song, “Swannanoa Tunnel”—“When you hear that hoot owl squallin’/ Somebody’s dyin’, babe, somebody's dyin’”
John Ehle wrote a novel about the epic, featuring the convict laborers, mountain residents, the mountain itself, and a character named Weatherby Wright, based on James Wilson, he said in an interview. The fictional chief undergoes a physical and mental weakening as his humanitarian nature yields to his obsession, and his ethics to progress.
This article was based in part on theses by Steve Little for Wake Forest University in 1972 and by Homer S. Carson III for UNCA in 2003
