Uncovering forgotten artifacts and delving into dusty archives to explore the little-known stories of our state. Got an idea for an upcoming column? Email us at editorial@ourstate.com.

Editor’s Note (October 2024): We love and celebrate our mountain communities; however, following the devastation of Hurricane Helene, many areas remain inaccessible for travel. Please check DriveNC.gov’s travel map for the latest on traveling to these areas.

Some people are called to a specific mission in life. Steve Little’s calling came disguised as the sound of a train threading its way through the Swannanoa Gap as he lay awake in his bunk at Camp Ridgecrest near Black Mountain in the early 1960s. His ears would perk up as the night train downshifted coming up the steep grade, entered the Swannanoa Gap tunnel, and emerged on the other side of the Eastern Continental Divide, a few hundred yards from his cabin. “I would sometimes imagine, Where is that train going? What’s it like to ride that train at night?” he says. “And I never had any idea where all that would lead.”

Steve Little, an attorney and the mayor of Marion, wrote Andrews Geyser: Star of the Mountain Railroad. photograph by Charles Harris

As it happens, Little now stands precisely where “all that” led. He’s strolling across the peaceful grounds of Andrews Geyser, just outside Old Fort. The track that once carried the train of his youth loops around and above the monument, offering a clue as to how a canny civil engineer conquered the Blue Ridge Escarpment.

Today, Little is a successful attorney and the mayor of Marion. But those professional pursuits can’t compete with an 8.4-mile stretch of steel rails, crossties, and tunnels that are the objects of his lifelong fascination: a serpentine route that proved experts wrong, opened western North Carolina to the world, and left a tragic legacy that has yet to be completely unearthed.

• • •

After the Civil War, the North Carolina legislature committed state money to continue the westward expansion of rail service “beyond the Blue Ridge.” A pair of businessmen and opportunists, George W. Swepson and Milton S. Littlefield, secured control of the railroad. The men turned out to be lousy railroad builders but gifted swindlers. They laid a few substandard miles of track before making off with most of the funds.

Swepson and Littlefield’s high jinks left the railroad at a standstill in the shadow of its last great obstacle: the Blue Ridge Escarpment. The state ultimately bought the meager railroad assets at auction and made two fateful decisions. They tapped a talented engineer, Maj. James W. Wilson, to figure out how to vault the Blue Ridge. And, because of the cash-strapped condition of the treasury, they chose to use convict labor to continue laying track. Many of the prisoners — 95 percent of whom were Black — were convicted on flimsy charges and sentenced to five years of hard labor solely to provide manpower for the railroad project.

In order to extend the railroad west over the Blue Ridge — an ascent of more than 1,100 vertical feet in about three miles — Maj. James W. Wilson designed a circuitous route that looped back on itself multiple times. Photography courtesy of State Archives of North Carolina

The decision to use convict labor was, and remains, a profound tragedy. “Convict leasing” was common at the time, an early example of the oppressive Jim Crow laws that haunted Black people in the South for almost a century. In all, more than 3,000 men and several hundred women were sent from the penitentiary in Raleigh to build the railroad, cook, and maintain the work camp.

“During that time period, just about all the railroads in the Eastern United States — and especially the South — were built by convict labor,” says Dan Pierce, professor emeritus of history at UNC Asheville. Pierce attended summer camp with Little and now lives in Ridgecrest, a short distance from the tracks where the train’s horn still echoes across the mountains.

• • •

Wilson believed that he had what it took to conquer the mountains. His solution to constructing the train track from Henry Station, just west of Old Fort, to the top of the escarpment — a direct line distance of just over three miles — was a circuitous 8.4-mile route that looped back on itself multiple times to avoid the steepest terrain, while establishing an average grade of two feet of elevation gain per 100 feet. Even so, some sections of the “Blue Wall” could only be overcome by blasting seven tunnels through solid granite using a new, and highly unstable, explosive: nitroglycerine.
The unheralded labor carried out by the railroad workers remains a staggering achievement. Deadly accidents were commonplace, yet work continued.

Railroad workers — many of them imprisoned on false charges — laid track and performed the dangerous labor of blasting tunnels through solid granite. A well-known photo depicts the construction of the Swannanoa Tunnel. Photography courtesy of “Stripes but no Stars,” Fred Kahn Asheville Postcard Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, UNC Asheville

Perhaps the most representative example of their accomplishments occurred in 1877. Wilson had concluded that the most efficient way to build the 1,832-foot-long Swannanoa Gap Tunnel was to dig simultaneously from both ends. So hundreds of workers lifted a 12-ton locomotive onto the dirt stagecoach road and proceeded to lay one section of temporary track in front of the train at a time. The men, aided by several oxen, pushed and pulled the steam engine six miles over the gap to facilitate excavation on the western side of the tunnel.

On March 11, 1879, Wilson wired Gov. Zebulon B. Vance that “daylight entered Buncombe County today through the Swannanoa Tunnel.” But shortly thereafter, Little says, a partial tunnel collapse took the lives of 19 prison workers and a guard. Despite the tragic setback, the first train chugged through the tunnel on its way to Asheville a year and a half later.

Dan Pierce teaches history at UNC Asheville and lives a short distance from the railroad tracks through the Blue Ridge Escarpment. photograph by Charles Harris

“It’s a feat — and a horrible feat — in many ways,” Pierce says. “We know from penitentiary records that at least 130 died, and we’re pretty sure a lot more died than that. I’ve always said that stretch of railroad is a massive graveyard. Like I tell my students, ‘It’s complicated.’ And Wilson is at the heart of that complication.”

But tragically, the loss of life faded from memory. The railroad was a boon to the mountains, drawing tourists and timber barons, and transforming the region both economically and culturally. To this day, Pierce considers it “the most important piece of infrastructure in the history of western North Carolina.”

• • •

Wilson capitalized on the project by teaming up with railroad executive Alexander Boyd Andrews to build the five-story Round Knob Hotel alongside the tracks near Old Fort. Nearby, they created a spectacular fountain. Water from a pond several hundred feet above the hotel dropped via a six-inch pipeline that ran underground into a high-pressure nozzle, sending a stream more than 100 feet into the air. Because of the train’s circuitous route, passengers could see the spectacle multiple times on their way up and down the mountain. The fountain served as a calling card for the hotel, helping it compete with contemporaries like the Battery Park Hotel in Asheville. The Round Knob Hotel thrived until it was destroyed by a fire in 1903.

Nature reclaimed the site of the hotel and the fountain until George Fisher Baker — a banker, philanthropist, and one of the richest men in America at the time — stepped in. He remembered the fountain fondly, having passed it as he traveled in his private train car to Asheville, and resolved to have it restored.

When the work was completed in 1912, he deeded the fountain to Southern Railway, which had purchased the railroad, and renamed it “Andrews Geyser” to honor his friend and fellow railroad board member. His one stipulation: Southern Railway must care for the fountain in perpetuity. Within half a century, despite Southern Railway’s promises, nature triumphed a second time.

• • •

Enter Steve Little. By 1969, he’d read John Ehle’s novel The Road and realized that it was a fictional version of the story about the very same stretch of railroad that had captivated him as a child. He had also visited Andrews Geyser as a camper at Ridgecrest. “It was like this treasure planted in the middle of the woods,” he remembers. “It was the most remarkable thing I’d ever seen, shooting 120 feet in the air above the trees and shrubs. That just blew my mind: How is it here?”

When it came time for him to write a thesis for his history degree, Little immediately knew what the topic would be: the building of the railroad up the Blue Ridge Escarpment. And when he entered law school at Wake Forest University, he learned how to conduct deed research. He went looking for the deed to the Andrews Geyser and discovered the perpetual care clause upon which George Fisher Baker had insisted.

“The geyser was the most remarkable thing I’d ever seen, shooting 120 feet in the air.”

Having seen the condition of the fountain firsthand, the precocious young law student wrote to Southern Railway, cited the deed, and reminded them of their obligation to care for the fountain. The railroad politely brushed him off. But Little and community leaders from Old Fort were undeterred. Ultimately, Southern Railway deeded the fountain to the town, which happily embraced the obligation to care for it. Boy Scouts and community volunteers cleared the overgrowth, cleaned out the basin, and rededicated the fountain in 1976.

Over the years, Little and Pierce’s fascination with the rail line continued. Pierce kept researching the troubled history of convict labor in North Carolina. Little wrote two books about the railway and developed a one-man play that dramatized the construction through the eyes of a prisoner. In 2021, Pierce suggested that they form an organization to create a memorial to the men and women who built the railway. The RAIL (Railroad and Incarcerated Laborers) Memorial Project was born.

RAIL (Railroad and Incarcerated Laborers) Memorial Project at Andrews Geyser was constructed by fourth-generation stone mason Paul Twitty II. photograph by Charles Harris

In October 2021, members of the nonprofit gathered on the grounds of Andrews Geyser to dedicate a monument crafted by Paul Twitty II, an Old Fort mason with ties to the railroad. In 2023, the group dedicated a second memorial — located near the western entrance of the Swannanoa Gap tunnel — to the workers who died during construction.

Even though the memorial was created almost 150 years after the railroad was built, the words of poet and author Clint Smith speak to the efforts by Little, Pierce, and RAIL Project volunteers to recall the sacrifices of those who were for so long forgotten:

No stone in the ground can make up for a life …
and yet, we must try to honor those lives, and to account for this history, as best we can.
It is the very act of attempting to remember
that becomes the most powerful memorial of all.

Andrews Geyser
2111 Mill Creek Road
Old Fort, NC 28762

Paul Twitty stands with the RAIL marble memorial. photograph by Charles Harris

Written in Stone

Old Fort resident Paul Twitty II is a fourth-generation stonemason whose cousin once worked for Southern Railway. Twitty and his friend James Logan were selected by the RAIL (Railroad and Incarcerated Laborers) Memorial Project to make the stone frame that holds two marble tablets honoring the incarcerated workers who built the WNC Railroad. They used locally sourced mountain rock along with river rock from nearby Mill Creek to create the frame, and embedded railroad spikes in the design to symbolize the railroad.

During the three weeks of construction, Twitty had time to reflect. “There were 3,000 men and hundreds of African American women, and they laid those tracks to bring that railroad up the mountain. They were on my mind,” he says. “I’m not a preacher, but God sees all of this, and he was with those people and all the trouble they went through.”

The spirit of Twitty’s late mother was nearby, too. Twitty cherishes a photo of her at 22, sitting on a stone bench near Andrews Geyser, 20 feet from where he worked: “To build a monument right there where my mother once sat for a picture — it was just a privilege for me to do that.”