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Pictured above: “Stripes but no Stars,” Fred Kahn Asheville Postcard Collection, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, UNC Asheville
Event: Wednesday, August 9 at 5:30 p.m. at the Black Mountain Library
Join us as Dr. Dan Pierce shares the history of the men who worked and died to bring the first trains across the Swannanoa Gap into Asheville.
When people talk about the history of the railroad in Western North Carolina, they think about how the railroad opened the mountain region to the outside world. By the end of the Civil War, the rest of the country started viewing the Blue Ridge Mountains as a world-renowned resource of raw materials. The railroad provided a way to transport these materials to a global economy. Yet even today one thing most people are unaware of is that convict labor, which was largely comprised of African American men, is responsible for the completion of what was once known as the Western North Carolina Railroad. North Carolina had built a state penitentiary by 1870, and an average of 65 percent of its prison labor was taken for the construction of the Western North Carolina Railroad. In all total, over 3000 convict laborers worked on this project and reports suggest between 125-300 convicts died during its construction. The actual cost of human life may never be truly quantifiable, but the memory of those who gave their blood, their sweat, and their lives on the completion of this monumental undertaking should always be honored.
The RAIL Project seeks to recognize the sacrifice these men made to achieve one of the greatest feats of 19th-century construction in Western North Carolina. This is a free program at the Black Mountain Library and everyone is invited.