“Swannanoa” is a corruption of the Cherokee phrase “Suwa’lĭ-Nûñnâ’hĭ” that means “the trail to Ani-Suwa’li,” referring to the Siouan-speaking people who lived just beyond the mountains. A popular local myth is that Swannanoa means “beautiful waters” and alludes to the Swannanoa River, which flows down from the Swannanoa Gap before rolling through the small mountain town of Swannanoa and on into Asheville. Train tracks snake along this key river valley, and they go through a tunnel under the gap.
The Swannanoa Tunnel transformed the Blue Ridge Mountains. This 1,832-foot tunnel is the longest in a complex of six tunnels completed between 1875 and 1879, and the railroad that goes through them connected the mountain’s primeval forests to the Atlantic seaboard. Within a decade of the tunnel’s completion, Asheville grew from a rural town of 2,600 people to a small city of 10,235. Lumber crews scoured the mountains, reducing old-growth trees to sellable timber.
As white scholars of Appalachian history and music, we had assumed this much accounted for why a song about the tunnel existed, but then we learned three critical facts that forever changed how we think about this tunnel and its song. First, the Western North Carolina Railroad (WNCR), the state-owned corporation in charge of building the line, used mostly Black people on its construction crews. Second, those workers labored at gunpoint. Third, this was their song.
Asheville Junction,
Swannanoa Tunnel,
All caved in, babe.
All caved in.
The WNCR’s construction was a murderous business. From 1875-1891, the corporation forced an unknowable number of wrongfully imprisoned African American men and women, mostly from the eastern part of the state, to work under the watchful eyes of armed, white overseers. In 1879, a white traveler passed through the Swannanoa Gap and described what he saw. “No criminals among them,” he said of the hundreds of Black people leased out by prisons to keep costs down. “But the South must have convict, if not slave labor to finish her railways.”
Many so-called convict laborers were forcibly worked to death. Some died of sickness, others in accidents. Guards killed workers, too. A representative legend endures: Two brothers walked away and ignored warnings to turn back, essentially accepting death over continuing to work in chains.
In a well-documented event, 19 shackled men drowned when their transport boat sank into the icy Tuckasegee River. One imprisoned worker named Anderson Drake saved a guard, but the hero remained a convict laborer because the guard accused Drake of stealing his wallet during the rescue. That night, a prison camp guard whipped Drake as the enchained bodies of 19 men remained at the bottom of the freezing river.
These train tracks are more than a transportation route. They’re the closest thing there is to a monument for hundreds of people who lost their lives building the railroad. An inadequate historical marker nearby notes the tunnel’s length and adds, “Constructed by convict labor.” According to multiple newspaper accounts and a government engineering record, laborers who died near the Swannanoa Tunnel were buried along the tracks. There’s no reason to doubt these graves exist, but their locations are unknown. No one has gone looking for them.