In the spring of 1907, a crew of Italian immigrant laborers reached the mouth of the Nolichucky Gorge in eastern Tennessee, looked at what lay ahead, and understood that what the supervisor had told them about the job had not prepared them for what was waiting. The Nolichucky River had been cutting through the Black Mountains and the Unaka Range for ten thousand years. In all that time it had made a deep river with walls of metamorphic rock that rose in places two thousand feet from the water to the rim. The river at the bottom was fast and cold, running in spring with the volume of snowmelt pouring out of the Black Mountains, and that volume was very large.
The walls of the gorge left no room on either bank for a railroad. In the narrow parts, the walls reached down to the water’s edge and there was nothing between the river and the rock. The men who stood at the entrance to that gorge in 1907 were there because the Clinchfield Railroad had to pass through it. They were Italians, most of them from Calabria, Sicily, and the hill provinces of the Abruzzo.
They had emigrated to the United States in the years after 1890 and found work in the construction gangs that built the infrastructure of American industrial expansion. They had built roads, sewers, and building foundations in the cities of the northeastern coast. They had built railroad grades through the mountains of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They came south because the Clinchfield was hiring, and the Clinchfield paid a dollar and a half a day, and that was money that could be sent home.
They would spend the next several years in that gorge. They drilled holes in the rock walls by hand, a process called double-jacking, in which one man held a steel drill and turned it a quarter turn between blows while two men took turns striking it with heavy hammers at a rate an experienced crew could maintain for hours. They filled the holes with dynamite and blasted. They removed the shattered rock.
They moved to the next section and started over. They did this in a gorge where the sun reached the bottom for only four hours a day in winter, where the river ran fast and cold six feet from where they stood, and where a man who slipped from the rock face into the Nolichucky in November had a chance of survival measured in minutes. This is the story of how the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway was built across the southern Appalachians between 1906 and 1915. It is the story of a railroad that required digging seventeen tunnels through solid mountain rock, hundreds of cuts and fills in terrain that resisted every tool available in the first decade of the twentieth century, crossing the Nolichucky River several times through a twelve-mile mountain passage, and a workforce of thousands of men whose wages were set by employers who also controlled their housing and their food supplies, and whose safety was protected by no regulation that existed.
It is the story of the last major unoccupied railroad pass through the southern Appalachians, and of the men who occupied it. The railroad they built is still in use. The trains that pass through Nolichucky Gorge today run through the tunnels that the drill crews dug in 1907, 1908, and 1909. The fills and cuts still hold the grade.
The bridges still cross the river. The men who built them exist in the records kept by the construction companies and in the census returns of the mountain counties the construction moved through, and in no other document widely available. To understand why the start of building the Clinchfield was delayed until 1906, you have to understand what mountain railroad work looked like in the American South in the decades after the Civil War. The great coalfields of the Appalachians were known before the war.
The Pocahontas fields of West Virginia, the Virginia fields in Wise and Dickenson counties, and the coal seams that ran beneath the mountains of eastern Kentucky had all been surveyed, assessed, and confirmed for quality by the 1850s. What the coalfields lacked was railroad access. Coal is a commodity worth nothing until it reaches market, and the markets for Appalachian coal lay in the cities of the northeastern coast, the steel mills of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Birmingham, and in the textile mills and manufacturing plants of the Carolina Piedmont, which in the 1870s ran on wood and water power and were waiting for coal to replace both. Getting Appalachian coal to any of those markets required crossing the mountain chains that separated the coalfields from the cities.
The Blue Ridge and the Appalachian ranges that form the backbone of the eastern United States posed a continuous barrier that rivers could not solve and wagon roads could not solve, and only railroads had the capacity to cross it in the quantities industrial markets required. The railroads built through the Appalachians in the 1870s and 1880s took the routes the terrain allowed. The Norfolk and Western worked up the New River valley in Virginia, linking the Pocahontas coalfields to tidewater. The Louisville and Nashville pushed through Cumberland Gap.
The Southern Railway used the French Broad River gap and the Saluda grade to pierce the Blue Ridge from the east. Each of those routes, once built, gave its owner a competitive position in the Appalachian coal shipping market, a position protected by pricing and by the simple fact that terrain already occupied could not be easily duplicated by a competitor. Only the Clinchfield gap remained. The route ran from the town of Elkhorn in eastern Kentucky south through Wise and Scott counties in the Virginia coalfields, across the mountains of Carter and Unicoi counties in eastern Tennessee, through Mitchell and Avery counties in western North Carolina, and down to the hills around Spartanburg, South Carolina, where it could connect to the existing rail network serving the textile mills of the Carolina Piedmont.
The route was about 277 miles long. It crossed terrain that every railroad survey since 1875 had identified as buildable, and no company had built it because the cost was prohibitive, and because the established railroads serving the neighboring markets had no interest in financing a competitor. George Latimer Carter was the man who decided to build it anyway. Carter was a Virginia businessman and coal land operator who had been assembling mining rights in the coalfields of southwestern Virginia since the early 1890s.
He understood the coal business from the extraction side, which meant he understood that the value of a coal seam was zero unless you could move the coal to a buyer, that moving coal required railroads, and that the railroads currently serving southwestern Virginia were carrying coal to northeastern markets that already had adequate service. The Carolina Piedmont, which Carter believed was underserved and therefore a valuable market, was not being served. Carter decided to build the railroad himself. He spent fifteen years assembling the legal and financial structure for a project that established railroad investors consistently refused to support.
He formed predecessor companies during the 1890s, acquiring rights of way through mountain counties that had not previously figured in any railroad strategic calculations. He negotiated with mountain landowners whose enthusiasm for the railroad and for the compensation offered for their land varied widely. Some sold willingly. Others sold because the eminent domain powers carried by railroad charters made negotiation optional.
By 1906, Carter had enough financing, rights of way, and political support from the legislatures of Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina to begin. The construction that began was one of the most technically demanding railroad projects in the United States since the original transcontinental. The construction organization Carter assembled reflected the standard practices of large-scale railroad building in the early twentieth century. The Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio contracted with construction companies that divided the line into sections and assigned each section to smaller firms that hired labor brokers to recruit workers.
This system spread responsibility across multiple layers in ways that made it difficult to assign responsibility when something went wrong, and made it easy to feign ignorance of working conditions that the construction companies preferred not to know about. The Italian workers who labored on the Clinchfield construction came through the padrone system, a labor brokerage network that had organized Italian immigrant labor on American construction projects since the 1880s. The padrone was a labor agent, usually himself an Italian immigrant, who maintained relationships with construction companies on one side and immigrant communities on the other. He recruited workers from specific villages and provinces in southern Italy, advanced them the cost of transportation from ports of arrival to the construction site, put them to work, and took his commission from the construction company for each worker while paying the workers after deducting what they owed.
The deductions were the mechanism. The workers lived in company-owned boarding houses or barracks that were rented to them at prices set by the company. They bought food and supplies from company-owned stores at prices also set by the company. This combination meant that a worker earning $1.
50 a day might see only $0. 50 or a dollar in real money after deductions. The rest went back to the company before the worker’s hand ever touched it. This was not a secret arrangement.
It was the standard practice of industrial construction labor of the era, refined into routine because it was effective at ensuring a continuous flow of labor and keeping construction on the schedule that bond conditions required. Whether this system worked in the workers’ favor is another account. The mountain men from eastern Tennessee, southwestern Virginia, and western North Carolina who worked alongside the Italian immigrants knew what hard physical labor in difficult terrain meant, because there was no other kind of work in the hills they came from. They had worked in the mountain logging operations whose timber the railroad was now being cut through.
They had worked in the small coal mines, tanneries, and iron furnaces that the mountain economy had supported before the railroad arrived. Construction paid better than most of what the hills offered, but it cost more in other ways about which the men had opinions, and they kept working anyway. The African American workers on the Carolina sections of the line were paid less than white workers for comparable labor. This was the standard hiring practice of the southern construction industry in 1907, and it was not a subject of public dispute in any state where the construction took place.
The seventeen tunnels required by the Clinchfield line were the work that most directly set the project’s schedule and cost. A tunnel is built in rock through a sequence that begins with drilling, proceeds to loading and blasting, continues with mucking out the debris, and then repeats. The drilling was done at the tunnel face, the advancing end where rock had not yet been extracted. In 1907, when Clinchfield construction began, drilling at most faces was done by hand.
Two men worked as a team. One held the steel drill and turned it a quarter turn between blows. Two men alternately struck it with heavy hammers at a rate an experienced crew could maintain for hours. A full drill crew working at the tunnel face operated several two-man teams at once.
Completing a full pattern of holes in hard metamorphic rock could take most of a workday. Drilling was followed by loading, filling each hole with the calculated amount of dynamite and seating the blasting caps. Loading crews worked in the dust from drilling and in the dust from every previous blast in the tunnel. The rock was primarily metamorphic, gneiss, schist, and quartzite, rocks with a high silica content.
Breathing silica dust over months of work in tunnels leads to silicosis, a progressive disease that scars lung tissue and reduces its capacity until it can no longer meet the body’s oxygen demands. A man who worked at a tunnel face for one season might not get silicosis. A man who worked at tunnel faces for five seasons had inhaled enough silica to guarantee it. The construction companies knew about silica and silicosis.
The disease had been documented in European mining literature since the nineteenth century and was understood by American mining engineers by the turn of the century. But what that understanding had not yet produced was legal regulation. There were no federal standards for tunnel dust exposure in 1907. There were no mandatory respirators.
There were no required ventilation systems beyond what the construction companies chose to provide. And what the construction companies chose to provide was generally inadequate by any standard set by later contracts. After each blast, the tunnel had to be ventilated before the mucking crews could enter to clean out the broken rock. The muckers loaded the material into dump cars by hand and hauled it out of the tunnel to disposal sites outside.
Then the cycle started over. The longest tunnel on the Clinchfield line runs through the Blue Ridge on the North Carolina-Tennessee border. The digging required crews working from both portals simultaneously, advancing toward a calculated meeting point near the center of the mountain. This was standard practice for long tunnels.
It cut in half the distance each crew had to advance, and therefore cut in half the time required. It also required the two tunnel headings to advance on lines that met precisely at the point the engineers specified within the margins of error the railroad required. The survey that fixed those lines was done with the instruments of that era, theodolites, steel tapes, and the calculations of the engineers who used them. The two tunnels met within the allowable margin of error.
The mathematical calculations were correct. The men who dug to that meeting point entered the tunnel every day for months, into a space three hundred feet from the portal after the first week and six hundred feet after the second, into a place where the only light was the carbide lamps they carried, where the air after a blast was full of smoke, nitrogen compounds, and silica dust, and where the rock overhead had been fractured by previous blasts and would be fractured again by the next one. Between blasts, the rock was under stresses altered by the excavation. Experienced miners judged the stability of the rock by sound.
A certain quality of sound when the rock was struck meant danger. The appropriate response was to move quickly. The men who had not mastered reading those sounds learned from the men who had. The men who did not learn quickly enough appeared in the accident records that noted the date, the general cause, and sometimes the name.
The Nolichucky Gorge required not just tunnels but bridges, and the bridges required foundations set in a river that was not cooperative with foundation work. The Nolichucky in the gorge ran at speeds that made working in its channel difficult and made the river dangerous during spring melt. The bridge crews that set the pier foundations worked inside cofferdams, temporary barriers of timber and earth built in the river to dry out the work area around each pier site. A cofferdam in the Nolichucky in April was a structure the river was constantly working to destroy, and the river did not always fail.
The piers were concrete poured into forms erected inside the cofferdams. The concrete work required moving aggregate and cement into the gorge on the construction road the crews had cut along the bottom, a road that was itself a major achievement given that the gorge did not always provide room for both the road and the railroad on the same bank. The construction sequences required the road first, which meant building through terrain that resisted road building for the same reasons it resisted railroad building. The bridge spans were steel structures fabricated in mills outside the gorge and shipped in sections to the work site.
The sections were assembled on falsework, temporary timber scaffolding erected in the river and on the banks to support the steel until the bridge could carry its own weight. The temporary falsework in the Nolichucky during flood season was liable to be swept away if the water rose too quickly overnight. And the river could rise very quickly overnight. The men who built that falsework and erected the steel structures understood the risks as well as anyone on a construction site.
They had seen what happened when things went wrong. They had opinions about the likelihood of disaster in the current situation, but they worked anyway because the job meant wages, and wages were why they were in the gorge. A man who fell into the Nolichucky did not survive long in any season. In spring, the current made rescue nearly impossible and the water temperature made survival impossible within minutes.
In summer, the current was less violent but still fast, and the walls of the gorge offered no easy exit from the water. The rescue boats kept at the work sites responded as fast as the river allowed. And the river did not always allow enough speed. The grades the Clinchfield line maintained through the mountain sections required cuts and fills on a scale that tested both the equipment available and the men who operated it.
A cut in rock is an excavation blasted and cleaned out to allow the railroad to pass through a hill at the required gradient. In the mountain sections, cuts could be forty or fifty feet deep through solid metamorphic rock. Blasting a fifty-foot cut required working from the top down through a series of blasts, each removing a layer of rock and exposing the next working face below. The men working at the bottom of those cuts worked in a space whose walls had been fractured by blasting, with fractured material above held in place by friction and the structure of recently disturbed rock.
Rock held by friction can lose its grip when the next blast changes the distribution of stress. Rockfall accidents in the cuts appear in the Clinchfield accident records among the entries noting deaths and injuries from falling material. The specific circumstances are described in general terms. The names attached to those entries are sometimes Italian, sometimes English, and sometimes recorded with the accuracy payroll records required, not the accuracy commemoration required.
The material excavated from the cuts was used in the fills, sections of the roadbed built up above the surrounding terrain to raise the track to the required elevation on the other side of the hill. Moving cut material to fill sites required either horse and wagon haulage or loading into dump cars on a temporary construction track. Both methods were slow relative to the volume of material in a fifty-foot cut. Construction continued anyway because the schedule was moving forward regardless.
The track-laying crews followed the grading. A track-laying crew measured its progress in miles per day, not feet, which made it the fastest stage of construction and the most dependent on the completeness and correctness of everything that had come before. The crew worked from the end of the existing track, laying out ties, rails, and spikes across the prepared roadbed, adjusting the alignment as it worked, and moving the material train forward whenever the end of the track had advanced enough to warrant it. The track reached the Nolichucky Gorge from the southern end in 1909.
Work in the gorge had been going on from both ends since 1907, and the first locomotive to cross the full length of the gorge ran on rails laid over a road that construction crews had spent three years cutting from solid rock. The Clinchfield line opened for full through freight service in 1915. The opening came nine years after construction began, three years behind the original schedule, and at a cost that exceeded the original bond issue by a margin that required additional financing during construction. The traffic the Clinchfield saw in the years after the opening was enough to pay off the bonds.
Coal moved from the Virginia fields south to the Carolina Piedmont and the industrial towns of the upper South. The freight rates the Clinchfield charged were competitive with those of the neighboring railroads that had previously monopolized the coal supply to those markets, a situation Carter had identified fifteen years before construction began. Carter did not remain in control of the railroad he built. The financial reorganizations required by the construction cost overruns transferred effective control of the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio to interests that did not share Carter’s priorities.
Carter was out of the railroad’s management within a few years of the opening. The Clinchfield was later acquired and reorganized, eventually passing into the CSX system that operates the line today. Carter’s name exists in railroad history because he was the promoter, and promoters leave behind a paper trail of incorporation filings, bond documents, and construction contracts that record the promoter’s name at every stage. The men who dug the tunnels left a different kind of record.
The opening in 1915 meant that the Italian workers who had spent years in the mountain camps were, by 1915, wherever their next job had taken them. The work in the Nolichucky Gorge was done. The work in the Blue Ridge tunnels was done. The fills were complete, the cuts were complete, the bridges were complete, the rails were laid, the ballast was tamped, and the first commercial train had crossed.
The men who did all of this were not gathered for a ceremony, because no ceremony was held for them. They were in the labor markets of the cities that construction workers moved between, following the projects the labor agents knew about, or they had returned to the agricultural economy of southern Appalachia. Or they had returned to Italy with whatever they had managed to save after the company had deducted what it considered due. The silica dust they had inhaled in the tunnels went with them wherever they went.
Silicosis develops over years. A man who worked at the Clinchfield tunnel faces in 1907 and 1908 would begin to notice his lung capacity declining in the early 1920s or in the late teens if his dust exposure had been severe. He would die of it wherever he had gotten to by that time, in whatever circumstances he had managed to arrange, with whatever medical care was available to a worker in America in that era. The construction companies that had employed him were not responsible for his death in any legal sense that the courts of the 1920s would recognize.
He had accepted the job, and the job was in the tunnels, and the tunnels were full of dust. The workers who died before a different regulatory standard existed were not covered by that standard. They were covered only by the era that employed them. The mountain men who worked on the local sections went back to the farms, logging operations, and small coal mines that railroad construction had disrupted.
Some carried their construction wages home and used them to improve their houses and the small operations the mountain economy allowed. Some moved to the towns that the completed railroad now connected to the outside world, finding work in the new economy the railroad made possible. The railroad they had built with their own hands now carried goods from those towns to markets that had been unreachable before. And the men who built it took part in that economy as customers, as workers, as small business owners, and in whatever other capacities the records did not document.
The African American workers who had graded the railroad through the Carolina sections returned to the agricultural and laboring economies of the rural South, because those were the economies open to them in the segregated labor markets of 1915. The wages they had received on the Clinchfield construction were lower than those of white workers for comparable labor, because that was the rate the market set for black labor in the South, and that labor market was not a free market in any sense that would have allowed workers to effectively object. Whether the wage was adequate is a question the records answer only in the terms the employers found satisfactory. The Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio earned the freight revenue the bondholders had been promised.
The coal moved. The Carolina Piedmont mills received supplies that the neighboring competing railroads could no longer fully control. The tariff charged per ton from the Virginia coalfields to Spartanburg reflected the cost of building seventeen tunnels, hundreds of bridges and fill structures, and 277 miles of mountain grades, and it generated enough revenue to cover those costs, pay off the debts, and return the capital the investors had put in. The men who built it were compensated at the rates the construction industry set and the company store system reduced.
And whether those wages were adequate is a question the records do not answer in terms the workers would have agreed to. The workers who considered the wages inadequate had the option of leaving, but that option was constrained by the transportation debts they owed the padrone and the store balances they owed the company store, plus the distance from the mountain camps to any other labor market that might be more favorable. The option existed in the legal sense. It did not exist in any other sense for most men in those camps.
You can drive your car today on the road that runs alongside the Nolichucky Gorge in eastern Tennessee. The road roughly follows the route the survey crews took in 1904 and 1905 when they fixed the line, because the gorge allows room for both the road and the railroad in specific places, and those places have not changed. The walls are the same walls. The river is the same river.
When a freight train passes through the gorge, the sound arrives before the train does, channeled and amplified by the rock walls that the drill crews faced in 1907 and that trains have been facing ever since. The bridges over the Nolichucky have been replaced or rehabilitated in the decades since the original construction, but they stand in the locations the engineers fixed in 1905, because the rocky gorge does not change the places where a bridge can be put. The tunnels are still in use. They have been lined with concrete in the intervening decades, concrete that protects the rock walls and reduces the erosion of fractured metamorphic rock over time.
The profile of the tunnel is much what the drill crews made it, reduced slightly by the thickness of the lining. If you stand at the mouth of the main tunnel on the North Carolina-Tennessee line and look in, you are looking at the opening that a drill crew from one direction and a drill crew from the opposite direction reached, meeting at the calculated point around 1909 within the tolerances the engineers specified. That meeting was not chance. It was the result of survey calculations, measurements, and daily adjustments required by the advancing drill faces over months of progress.
The engineers who made the mathematical calculations are named in the records. The men who dug to the calculated point are not. The Clinchfield line is still there. The CSX trains that use the line today carry coal, intermodal freight, and whatever the transport mix of the present era requires.
The grades through the mountains are the grades the original surveys fixed and the construction crews built between 1906 and 1915. The bridges today carry loads the early engineers did not design for because freight cars have gotten heavier, and the structures have been strengthened and replaced to suit the heavier loads, but they still stand in the locations the early engineers chose because the gorge offers no other locations. The men who built the track, the bridges, and the tunnels exist in the payroll records of the contracting firms and in the 1910 census returns of the mountain counties, which show clusters of workers of Italian origin in the counties along the construction route, and then show those workers absent by 1920, having moved on to other labor markets, other projects, other lives or other deaths in other places. Their names were recorded with the accuracy payroll records required, not the accuracy a monument requires, because no monument was planned and none was built.
You can ride a freight train through the Nolichucky Gorge today if the nature of your work puts you on freight trains. You will spend about twelve minutes in the gorge at freight train speed. The walls will be close, and the river will appear below you where the line crosses it. The tunnels will be short periods of darkness, and then the mountain is behind you.
In those twelve minutes, you will cross what the construction crews of 1907 spent three years building, and you will come out of the gorge and the twelve minutes will be behind you. The gorge does not know you were there. The gorge has run between the mountains for ten thousand years, and the railroad has run through it for a little over a hundred. The men who put the railroad there have been gone from it for longer than that.
The mountains are the same mountains. The gorge is the same gorge. The railroad is still there.
