What would the bones say? Would they remember Atlanta, Birmingham or other cities where they lived as men? Would they beg for headstones?
Would they ask to be sent back South?
At a slope where saplings grow and ferns lace the ground, an unnamed cemetery contains the bones of at least 40 men, maybe more, who left Georgia and other Southern states and came to West Virginia 80 years ago.
Desperate for work, any work, during the Great Depression, the black men traveled north to work on the Hawk’s Bridge Tunnel. The 1930-31 construction of the 3.8-mile shaft, which diverted the flow of the New River, is considered the greatest industrial tragedy in America. It had been largely forgotten until the bones’ recent discovery.
Historians estimate that anywhere from 450 to 1,500 people died building it. The majority succumbed to acute silicosis, a fatal lung disease caused by breathing silica dust. Most made it back home to die, but not all. Hundreds died here, nearly 500 miles north of Atlanta, in hills far removed from the land they’d known.
Now, some West Virginians want to find descendants of those lost tunnel workers and invite them to attend a memorial service in October. They are confident that families in Georgia, the Carolinas and other Southeastern states remember a loved one who went off to West Virginia and never returned.
“We’d like to do something,” said Charlotte Neilan, publisher of the weekly Nicholas Chronicle, who has headed an effort to recognize the unmarked graves. “What happened to them is awful.”
Tunnel made ‘zombies’
Nearly 5,000 people worked on the tunnel, which created a watery shortcut to a hydroelectric power plant at nearby Gauley Bridge. Construction began in March 1930. Rinehart & Collins was the subcontractor, hired by Union Carbide to build a tunnel at breakneck speed.
It was hellish work. Most of the men who toiled inside the tunnel were black, working 10-hour shifts, six days a week. Some earned no more than 22.5 cents per hour at a time when a loaf of bread cost 8 cents. Some died in rockslides; others were crushed by heavy machinery. But most died a breath at a time, inhaling clouds of silica dust ground out of the rock.
There were those who died two months after starting, said Clyde Booker, a history professor at Northern Kentucky University. Booker is the author of “Dyin’ For a Job: An American Tragedy,” a 166-page account of the tunnel project.
“The color of a person’s skin determined ... the work you did and even whether you lived or died,” he said. “If you were black, if you were from the South, you had a very short life expectancy.”
Gauley Bridge resident Nancy Taylor remembers her mother describing “zombie” workers as they emerged from the tunnel at the end of a dusty shift. They were white from the silica dust, dragging their feet, silent.
“She used to run and hide under the bed,” Taylor said.
The tunnel was completed in 21 months, three months ahead of schedule. The New River, which for untold millennia curled past Gauley Mountain, suddenly dove under it. The tunnel was a technological triumph, helping generate electricity for a region where lightbulbs weren’t standard in every home.
Meanwhile, men kept dying.
No place to put the dead
A local newspaper, the Fayette Tribune, was first to note that something was wrong at Hawk’s Nest.
“Their [sic] is a great deal of comment regarding the unusually large number of deaths among the colored laborers at the tunnel works,” the paper reported in February 1931. “The deaths totaled about 37 in the past two weeks.”
No one, perhaps, knew that better than Summersville mortician Hadley White. He had a contract to bury tunnel workers, or to pack them to be shipped back home.
White had a problem. A small slave cemetery from the previous century quickly filled with bodies of black victims. Burying them in white cemeteries was out of the question. And still the bodies, encased in oak boxes built near the tunnel site, kept coming.
He began taking the dead to his mother’s farm, just on the edge of town, and burying the bodies beside a cornfield. Records vary on how many he buried. Some say he interred 169; others place the estimate at 60.
Summersville resident H.C. White, Hadley White’s son, said his father had little choice but to bury the people on farmland.
“When they started getting killed, they had to do something with them,” he said.
Like his father, H.C. White became a mortician. And, like his father, White found himself called upon to bury the same long-ago tunnel victims when their remains came to light.
Lost cemetery found again
In the early 1970s, state Department of Highways crews began widening stretches of U.S. 19 at Summersville. Their work took them across a wooded site where corn once grew. There, earthmoving equipment came across rotted wood and bones.
The state hired a company to unearth the remains. It also retained White, whose father originally buried the bodies, to make sure the bones were handled properly.
Workers placed remains in boxes about 4 feet long and 16 inches wide. They drove about two miles south to a state-owned site close to Summersville Lake. It was a shady spot crowded with hemlocks and dotted with boulders. Workers laid out the boxes in rows and reburied the bones on a plot not a half-acre in size. They placed temporary metal markers, the sort funeral homes use while awaiting gravestones, atop each plot. One state employee, visiting the plot, estimated that it contained 45 or more graves. The discrepancy between the early estimate of about 60 graves and the 1972 reports has never been fully explained.
The state got back to the business of building a road. Trees and weeds hid the cemetery. It became a dumping place for old appliances and other trash. People seeking romantic privacy parked there.
The cemetery may have been lost for all time, but for Richard Hartman of South Charleston, W.Va. He learned about the graves while researching a graduate paper about the tunnel.
Intrigued, he contacted state officials, who provided him maps of the area near Summersville Lake. In 2007, Hartman and a friend also visited H.C. White, the mortician, who shared his knowledge of the burials.
After a few unsuccessful tries, the two sought out a wooded site about 100 yards down a hill from the highway. The first thing they saw was a rusting washer and dryer. The second sight: a 10-inch aluminum marker. It identified the person buried below as “39.” The marker contained no other information, but that was enough: The Hawk’s Nest victims had been found.
“Those men were buried in unconsecrated ground,” said Hartman. “They were disposed of.”
Search for work led north
Did any of the dead come from Atlanta or elsewhere in Georgia? Historians and archivists at the Atlanta History Center, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University cannot say. None had any records of men heading to West Virginia.
Josephine Bradley, head of African American studies at Clark Atlanta, said the West Virginia laborers were little different from other Southern blacks. Eighty years ago, onetime sharecroppers and other underemployed black people headed to Chicago, Detroit and other industrial areas, seeking work and fleeing Jim Crow.
“Most people went north and west,” said Bradley. “Very seldom do you read about them heading to West Virginia.”
A few records at the Fayette County, W.Va., Courthouse, as well as from Union Carbide, show most black workers came from southern West Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, said Dwight Harshberger, a psychologist who works at West Virginia University’s department of community medicine. He’s the author of “Witness at Hawk’s Nest,” a fictionalized account of the project, published last year.
“What’s remarkable is how many came,” he said.
Equally remarkable, he said, “is how many died.”
The burial ground has been cleaned — appliances removed, underbrush cut. Still, it has an air of neglect. Dead leaves rot atop boulders. A handful of aluminum grave markers stick up at odd angles from the earth. A few discarded deer bones litter the tract.
The site also has a reverence, bestowed by nature. On a recent day, raindrops from a cloudburst sat fat on the needled boughs of hemlocks. Sunlight filtered through the branches, casting little pools of light. The wind sighed.
Neilan, the newspaper publisher, also sighed. She stepped carefully from one grave to the next, her feet avoiding the depressions in the earth.
“Somebody, somewhere, misses these men,” she said. “We now need to find these families and give them closure.”
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