Outside of Old Fort, the Western North Carolina railroad bends around Andrews Geyser. The man-made fountain is named after the vice president of the company that owned the railroad, built in the 1870s.
Now, the thousands of laborers who did the work are finally memorialized at the site, too.
As so many places are in the mountains of Western North Carolina, Andrews Geyser is especially picturesque in October. The bright fall sunshine lit up a day when the latest step took place in trying to heal one of the region’s most painful and horrific tales.
“Andrews Geyser is right in the middle the largest loop of what is known as the Old Fort loops,” Steve Little said. He's the mayor of Marion, and a historian who's written books about the Western North Carolina railroad.
Little calls this stretch of tracks the most significant engineering achievement in the United States during the time it was built from 1875 to 1879.
“The straight line distance from Henry Station to the western portal of the Swannanoa Tunnel is 3.4 miles," he said. "But the track is 9.4 miles. It loops so it can climb 1,002 feet.”
Who built this marvel?
Thousands of incarcerated laborers built this railroad — and nearly all of them were African American.
Dr. Dan Pierce is a historian at UNC Asheville and the president of The Railroad and Incarcerated Laborer memorial, or RAIL Project, which pushed to build the memorial.
“It’s important to recognize the individual sacrifice and the gift that they all gave us," he said after reading some of the names of the laborers, which are listed on one side of the memorial.
Once completed, the railroad finally connected Western North Carolina to the rest of the state, helping to build a new industry — tourism — which more than 140 years later remains the region’s chief economy. The laws that incentivized the arrests of all those incarcerated African American laborers that built the railroad — those still linger to this day, too.
“In many ways ,states just revamped the slave codes and turned them into what is known now as the 'Black Codes,'" said Dr. Darin Waters, North Carolina’s state historian. He's also a director for The RAIL Project and co-host of BPR's The Waters & Harvey Show.
He said the Black Codes essentially criminalized vagrancy.
“It really was a way for states to continue to control the labor, especially of Black men," Waters said. "You could be convicted of being a vagrant, put into jail for X number of years, for something as simple as not being able to show that you were gainfully employed. And then the state would contract with private employers to use that labor on work crews throughout the state."
On Sunday, the memorial to the incarcerated laborers - nearly all of whom were African American - that built the railroad into #WNC in the late 1870’s was dedicated at Andrews Geyser outside of Old Fort #avl #avlnews #ncpol One side of memorial lists some names of laborers pic.twitter.com/EVjjqok3do
— Matt Bush (@MattBushMD) October 18, 2021
The disproportionate arrests and incarcerations of African Americans that still exist in 2021 – that can be traced to the Black Codes. “This has had a tremendous impact on Black families. We have to have the courage to face that.”
Of the more than 3-thousand laborers forced to build the Western North Carolina railroad in the late 1870’s, approximately 98% were African American according to The RAIL Project website. And until this month, they weren’t recognized at Andrews Geyser. But the vice president of the company that owned the railroad - Colonel Alexander Boyd Andrews - is the site's namesake. “In this country, there’s a need to recognize that there’s been an ongoing conversation between capital and labor. And capital always seems to win out.”
Now that the labor has finally been recognized, the next step is to find some of the graveyards where the close to 300 laborers believed to have died working on the railroad are buried. Easier said than done according to Steve Little.
“When rock would fall in the tunnel, it would sometimes fall on the incarcerated laborers. They’d be killed. There was no formal graveyard. They would bury them right there where they worked. The whole railroad is sort of a graveyard.”
The construction of the Western North Carolina railroad also spawned a popular song that has long been misunderstood. Read more about that here from The Bitter Southerner
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