Criminal - The Tunnel

Episode Date: August 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.” We speak with Gary Carden, George Frizell, and Al Fisher about the Cowee Tunnel disaster. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey

involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. You're right on the edge of the Smokies.

You're in a country that is just on the verge of being primitive and remote, but it's going rapidly to the tourists, 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. And there wasn't a sound. And to sit there in the dark, I had no idea at the time that that was paradise. 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. 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 and Observer called

too horrible to chronicle without a shutter. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. 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 was no easy way to tunnel through a mountain. You're talking about manual labor, people using picks and carting the debris away. Here's 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 they rented prisoners 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, we'll give you another one. The prisons were turned into a business. Not far from where Gary Carden lives, a group of African-American prisoners were leased to the Western North Carolina Railroad Company. They were building a new rail line in the mountains along the Tuckasegee River. 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. 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 they started to cross the river.

Okay, the bottom of that flat-bottomed boat is full of slush. It's water, icicles, just a mix. And it's, you know, just a mix. And it's a couple inches deep because it's been snowing all night. And as they 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's sinking, and that's the water coming up through the hole. And they get up and they say, the boat's sinking, the boat's sinking and that's the water coming up through the hole. And they get up and they said, the boat's sinking, the boat's sinking, and the guard

said, no, it's not. Sit down, sit down. And they push the guards to the back of the boat. And when they're all on the back of the boat, capsizes. And into the river they go. And of course it's freezing cold. But because they were chained together, you know, because I'm chained to you, when I go, I'm going to bring you. And you'll bring the next one because you're chained to them. And it's just voom, voom, voom, voom, voom, voom, voom. And all 19 of them went into the river. There were people on the shore that said that the most pitiful sight they'd ever witnessed is when they'd forced their head above the water and then called for help.

And they said they heard them call for wives, for mother, for God, for everything, and then it got very quiet. One local paper wrote, it was one of those accidents that seemed unavoidable due to the sudden panic which seized 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. Nineteen bodies were pulled from the Tuckasegee River. So they loaded a sled, and people who saw them lay the dead in the sled, it was pretty much

like a load loading cord wood, put them all in that sled and pulled it up the top of the hill and they dug those three trenches and then they just kicked them in there. There was no ceremony, nothing. The youngest was 15 years old. The oldest was 52. 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 did they have the shackles and chains on? 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 were found gambling, or they found them behind the store with two other guys drinking. It was not a serious criminal in the whole crowd. After the Civil War, so-called Black Codes were passed across the South, laws designed to control newly freed enslaved people. These laws made it easy to arrest 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 worth a dollar. Vacancy statutes made it a crime to be unemployed. Standing on the street became loitering, and walking at night became breaking curfew. Those laws were called the Black Code. And when a little research is done, you find out they're just reinventing slavery. It has a different name. It has a sanction of the government, but it's actually an immoral, unethical practice.

In 1870, the prison population in North Carolina was 121. By 1890, that number had grown to 1,302. The state didn't have the resources to manage the incredible influx of prisoners. One prison official asked the legislature to just let some of these men go. But instead, the state put them to work on the railroad. It was called convict leasing, and it happened all over the South. 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 leased to businessmen, plantation owners, and corporations. Professor Matthew Mancini writes about the history of convict leasing in his book, One Dies, Get Another. He writes that more than 90% of the convicts were black, and describes the lease 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. They sometimes committed suicide. They were so miserable. They would work until they fainted. And they knew what they could do if they just couldn't take it anymore.

You just dropped your hammer and started walking away, and the guard would shoot you. And there was even a story, I don't know whether it's true, about two brothers who just looked at each other and said, are you ready, James? Yeah, I'm ready. Let's go. And they dropped their hammers and walked until they were shot. 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. After the Cowie Tunnel disaster, the Western North Carolina Railroad Company went back to work. New prisoners were brought in, and construction of the tunnel was completed. Gary Carden 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, once you go down to Dillsborough, and they've got this tourist trap, little town down here, they have a train,

and it's called the Smoky Mountain Train. And, of course, it's a tourist trap too. And tourists get on it and ride through the tunnel. Well, they come through that tunnel, and there's always somebody on that train that says, you are now coming through Calloway Tunnel. Ninete 19 men died working on this tunnel. They drowned 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. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman

as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Hey, it's Scott Galloway, and on our podcast, Pivot, we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions.

What should you use it for? What tools are right for you? And what privacy issues should you ultimately watch out for? And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. 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 its building. Trains have wrecked in it. Cave-ins have plagued it from the beginning. 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. 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 Forger's Canteen and drove a few miles before he told me to pull over just off road, so we could 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. He had never been to the tunnel himself himself but said he had done some research and he was sure we would be able to find it it's hard to get to oh boy, okay here we go, so I'm going to take my

huh okay let me let me put on my hat. Okay. We 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, 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. Al seemed prepared with a backpack. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had brought a first aid kit and extra water. All I had was four 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 the tracks actually cross the river right here. And then right on the other side of the river is the tunnel. And now we're going to cross the river on the tracks. Yes, and so then you can see the tunnel. That's the mouth of the tunnel right there in the curve there where it's kind of dark.

Well, 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 doesn't seem like the safest thing. So on the other side of the bridge here, the tunnel starts. Okay, so we've made it to the other side. There's the entrance to the tunnel.

If we were frightened people, we might think this was a little scary. But here we go, plowing ahead. It looks dark, doesn't it? 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. Will you hold that light?

Wow. Okay. It's getting dark very quickly in here. Yeah. It's getting dark very quickly in here. But it's amazing to look at the rock that you can see. This is kind of wild. That they've really chiseled this rock out. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And now we're kind of, so we can still see the light behind us.

Yep. But that will go away. So if a train were to come right now, we'd 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.

We stopped. Al turned off the small flashlight he was carrying it was 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 the story is more it's the mountain crying to remind us what happened here. Reminding us, you know, just a reminder of the past that was forgotten. For a long time.

Forgotten for a long time. And there's the daylight again. Today the Cowie Tunnel disaster lives on for people riding the tourist train and for those who love to tell ghost stories. They're folk songs about 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 men who died.

If I had my way, you would bring those bodies out of there and you would reinter them in a grave in Dillsboro, and there would be a little museum there of the history of what happened to those 19 men. 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 says, are conversations. © transcript Emily Beynon Special thanks to Wilson Sayre. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal.

You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. We're on Facebook and Twitter, at Criminal Show. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX.

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