Episode 120: The Tunnel

Aug 2, 2019

In the late 1800s, North Carolina was trying to build a railway system through the Western part of the state. In December of 1882, something went wrong. The Raleigh News and Observer called it “too horrible to chronicle without a shudder.”

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you're at an age of the Smokies

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you're in country that is just on the verge of being primitive and remote but it's going rapidly to the tourist to the real estate people and the air is not as pure as it was when I was a kid when I used to sit on that porch at night with my grandparents

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and there wasn't a sound and the sit there in the dark I had no idea at the time that that was very nice but it was Gary Cardin has lived in this exact house in the mountains of Western North Carolina for almost his entire life he's 84 years old his grandparents built the house and raised him here I sat with him in the front room he told me that I was sitting in the same spot where his grandfather's coffin was placed

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East because he's been here in this small town for so long he knows stories that others have forgotten like what happened in December of 1882 something the Raleigh News & Observer called too horrible to Chronicle without a shudder I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal

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in the late 1800s North Carolina was trying to build a railway system through the western part of the state they wanted it built quickly they wanted to move coal and Timber and hopefully make a lot of money but there is no easy way to Tunnel through a mountain you're talking about manual labor people using picks and and carting the the debris away

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Western Carolina University archivist and historian George Frizzell they're not going to have the kind of mechanized equipment that people are used to today we're not talking about heavy machinery earth-moving equipment bulldozers that's the reason the labor is so strenuous in 1877 the state came up with a plan that they thought would both save money and speed things up and I ranted prisoners

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to the railroad and the idea of being of course you have to feed them six cents a day and you have to keep them put them up for the night and if one tries to get away you can shoot them and if one dies will give you another one

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the presence were turned into a business

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not far from where Gary Cardin lives a group of African American prisoners were released to the Western North Carolina railroad company they were building a new rail line in the mountains along with Tuckasegee River

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they had to manually bore through 700 feet of stone to make a tunnel big enough for a train to pass through it would be called the Cowie tunnel the men were chained to one another while they worked and to get to the tunnel each morning the men had to get on a boat in their chains to cross the river

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one morning at the end of December in 1882 it had been snowing and raining heavily the river was very high but the guards instructed the prisoners to board the boat and I started to cross the river okay the bottom of that flat bottom boat is full of slush it's water icicles just a mix and it's you know a couple of inches deep cause it's been snowing all night

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and as I go that slush goes to the front of the boat and then it comes to the back of the boat and it's just going back and forth they think the boat sinking and that's the water coming up through the hole and they get up and they said about sinking the boat thinking in the garden said no it's not sit down sit down and they push the garbage to the back of the boat and when they're all in the back of the boat capsizes

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and the end of the river they go and then of course it's freezing cold but because they were chained gather you know because I'm chained to you when I go I'm going to bring you and you will bring the next one because you're chained to them and it's just from from from from from from and all 19 of them went into the river they were people on the chores

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sad that it's a most pitiful sight that ever witness is when they're dead forced their head above the water and call for help and they said they heard them call for wives for mother for God for everything and then very quiet

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one local people wrote it was one of those accidents that seemed unavoidable due to the sudden Panic which sees the convicts in the boat the st. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that the convicts were drowned by clasping each other like knots of serpents and swept down to the lower Rapids below which they were found by twos and threes tightly clasped together in their death lock

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19 bodies were pulled from the Tuckasegee River so they loaded a sled and people who saw them lay the dead end the sled it says pretty much like a load loading cord would put them all and that's LED and pulled it up the top of the hill and they dug those three tranches and then they just kicked him in there there was no ceremony nothing the youngest was 15 years old the oldest was 52

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to Gary says the 19 bodies were dumped in unmarked Graves and forgotten what bothers him is that it's likely that the men wouldn't have died if they hadn't been chained together why do they have the Shackleton changer

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kind of well the railroad says that's because they're dangerous men well those dangerous men were charged with misdemeanors every one of them they were there because they committed crimes like they walked on the highway after dark you know or they work found gambling or like a fountain behind the store with two other guys drinking was not a serious criminal in the whole crowd

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after the Civil War the so-called Black Codes were passed across the South laws designed to control newly freed enslaved people these laws made it easy to rest black men and women and charge them with felonies for misdemeanor crimes they could serve five-year prison terms for minor offenses like stealing a pig or a chicken Orthodox or

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vagrancy statutes made it a crime to be unemployed standing on the street became loitering and walking at night became breaking curfew that will come close will call the black code and when LOL research is done you find out there just Reinventing slavery it has a different name it has a sanction of the government but it's gone

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actually an immoral or unethical practice in 1870 the prison population in North Carolina was a hundred and twenty one by 1890 that number had grown to 1302 the state didn't have the resources to manage the incredible influx of prisoners one prison official ask the legislature to just let some of these men go but instead the state put them to work on the railroad

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load it was called convict Leasing and it happened all over the South

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the 13th amendment abolished slavery in 1865 but the amendment left an exception slavery shall not exist except as punishment for Crime instead of being sent to prison people convicted of crimes could be least two businessmen plantation owners and corporations professor Matthew Mancini writes about the history of convict leasing in his book one dies get another

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he writes that more than 90% of the convicts were black and describes the least system as one of the harshest and most exploitative labor systems known in American history from 1877 to 1891 more than half of North Carolina's prisoner population was working on the railway I found dams committed suicide they were so miserable I would work until they fainted

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and they they knew what they could do if they just couldn't take it anymore you just dropped your hammer

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and started walking away and the guard would shoot you

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and there were was I even a story I don't know if it's true about two brothers who just looked at each other and says you ready James the I'm ready let's go and they drop their Hammers and walked until they were shot

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the railroad companies promised quote very comfortable quarters meals and clothing but conditions were incredibly harsh one local reporter who visited the living quarters wrote that the prisoners were driven into a row of prison cars where they were tightly boxed for the night with no possible chance to obtain either air or light and that the conditions in the camps were squalid and horrifying

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after the Cowie tunnel disaster the Western North Carolina Railroad Company went back to work new prisoners are brought in and construction of the tunnel was completed Gary Cardin says he grew up hearing the story as a sort of Legend a ghost story about dangerous felons that's the way a lot of people in Jackson County talk about it well if you drive through the

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what you go down to Dillsboro and they've got this tourist trap little town down here they have a train and it's called the road Smokey Mountain train and of course it's a tourist trap to and tourist get on it and ride through the tunnel well I come through that tunnel and there's always somebody on that train that says you are now coming true Cowie tunnel 19 men died working on this

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Don they drown in the river down there and they brought them back up here and buried them on top of the tunnel up here and that's their tears falling through here that you see now as we go through there's a lot of water falling that's the tears of those dead men

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in 1963 the Asheville citizen times published an article called some believe Cowie tunnel there's a curse the article goes on to say death accompanied it's building trains have wrecked in it cave-ins have plagued it from the beginning

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there are many stories about trains inexplicably stalling in the Cowie tunnel stories about train derailments and of the tunnel caving in and trapping trains people in Jackson County say they've heard the sounds of pickaxes on Stone clinking chains and splashing water

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we learned about the tunnel from a listener his name is Al Fisher he sent us an email saying he'd recently moved to the area from Georgia and realized he was living right up the mountain from a train tunnel that people said was haunted we asked Al if we could come visit I said I'd pick him up we met near a restaurant called the forgers canteen and drove a few miles before he told me to pull over just off the road so

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start walking so you'll see the river is down off the side of the road here on the left and the river runs right along the railroad tracks or the railroad tracks run along the river and this is the river where the men drowned yes correct

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he'd never been to the tunnel himself but said he had done some research and he was sure we would be able to find it hard to get to oh boy here we go I'm gonna take my car

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okay let me

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look at my hat okay they have a hat we're really going in here yeah so if you if you aren't up for this we don't have to no no no please please please I didn't know that I mean I guess I shouldn't have assumed that we would that it would be a paved Road I wasn't prepared to go hiking we made our way down a steep Ridge to the railroad tracks below the brush was dense and it was hot L seen

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with a backpack I wouldn't have been surprised if he had brought a first aid kit an extra water all I had was for extra batteries in my back pocket in case the recorder died we walked for about a quarter mile down the tracks before we came to the river so now we're kind of coming around a curve here yeah and we'll this it attracts actually crossed the river right here and then right on the other side of the river is the tunnel and now

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we're

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we're going to cross the River on the tracks yes and so then you can see the tunnel that's that's the mouth of the tunnel right there in the curve there with the dark still don't don't break your ankle on this thing I'm glad there's not a train coming can you imagine the Run we'd have to do so we're crossing the river on the train ties which

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seemed like the safest thing but

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so on the other side of the bridge here the tunnel starts

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Okay so we've made it

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to the other side there's the entrance to the tunnel

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if we were frightened people we might think this was a little scary but here we go plowing ahead

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it looks dark doesn't it

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the tunnel looks barely big enough for a train to pass through it's pretty amazing that it was dug by hand well here we go into the tunnel the minute you go inside the temperature drops you can feel it the light from the opening stays with you for the first 50 feet or so and then it starts to get dark gosh

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will you hold that light light wow it's getting dark very quickly in here but it's amazing to look at the rock that you can see

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it's kind of wild that they've really chiseled this rock out yeah pretty amazing and now we're kind of so we can still see the light behind us but that will go away so if a train were to come right now we just get along the side of the wall I guess after a couple hundred feet the tunnel begins to curve and all the light disappears

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we start our turned off the small flashlight he was carrying those pitch black and the sound of the dripping water came from all around I asked him to turn the light back on it Shone like a spotlight on the rough ceiling of the tunnel above us you can see all these small dents in the stone I wondered if they were created by the men who had been forced to work here every day I've wondered if maybe

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the story is is more it's the mountain crying to remind us what happened here and my niggas just a reminder of the past but was forgotten for a long time forgotten for a long time

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and there's the daylight again

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today the Cowley tunnel disaster lives on four people riding the tourist train and for those who love to tell ghost stories there are folk songs but what happened but Gary Cardin says that's not good enough we owe those 19 men more than that he wants to find other ways for people to remember what really happened he's been researching the incident and with the help of various Scholars he now has a list of the names and ages of the 19

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who died if I had my way you would bring those bodies out of there and you would re-enter them in a grave in Dillsboro and there would be a little Museum there the history of what happened to those 19 men

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it's unlikely that the bodies will be disinterred and given a proper burial in part because there's confusion about exactly where they are there has been talk of putting a plaque near the tunnel but Gary doesn't think anyone will hike out to the woods to look at a plaque and having been in those woods I have to agree he wants something in town something the people of Jackson County will see and talk about the best memorials he

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as our conversations

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criminalist created by Lawrence poor and me nydia Wilson is our senior producer Susanna Roberson is our assistant producer audio mix by raw buyers special thanks to Wilson Sayer Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at this is Criminal.com we're on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show Criminal is recorded in the Studio's of North Carolina public radio

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UNC were proud member of radio topia from PRX a collection of the best podcast around I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal

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