John Henry: the man, the myth.
Countless legends have sprung from the history of railroading.
But in South Appalachia, one tale seemingly outshines all others—for its drama and pathos, for its content and originality.
It’s the story of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man, the human who pitted his skill and strength against the machine—and won.
It is a song of a man locked in mortal combat with a machine, the stream drill. And it’s perhaps one of the most fitting tributes ever paid to the pride Americans traditionally have placed on hard, honest work.
The John Henry legend was born more than one and a quarter centuries ago in Summers County. It’s about an African American steel driver who hammered steel into rock to make a hole in which an explosive charge could be inserted.
The story of John Henry had its origin at the eastern end of the 1.25-mile long Big Bend Tunnel of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway near Talcott.
As legend has it, after about an hour, with sweat rolling and heart pounding, big John Henry had outdriven the hated steam machine by several feet.
Obviously, the man vs. machine contest set the stage for one of the most dramatic contests of American folklore.
But what really adds fuel to the folk tale is that John Henry was a black man, probably a former slave and probably from either Virginia or North Carolina. He likely was between the age of 30 and 35 when he came to work at the tunnel in 1870.
According to legend, he stood about six feet tall and weighed about 200 pounds. He reportedly had long, sinewy arms and a powerful torso.
The usual story about John Henry is that he was a black steel driver who pitted his strength against the steam drill to prove his supremacy, and after winning his fight, dropped dead “with his hammer in his hand.”
John Henry looms larger than life in the myth that seals his immortality.
As one might expect, many of the facts about this mythic showdown between man and machine have been lost to the ages.
But one thing is sure: scholars and researchers are still chipping away at the myth to shed light on the real man who wielded his hammers in a battle with mechanization that would resound in folklore if people talk and sing about their heroes.
Interestingly, John Henry was a legendary steel-drivin’ man who died with a hammer in his hand, but he was a tad more than that, according to scholars in the 21stcentury.
Some college professors with time and resources on their side have all but debunked the popular myth about John Henry, saying that he was a flesh-and-blood convict who may have been buried at the State Penitentiary in Richmond.
In one scholarly paper after another, historians seemingly have brought proof to bear on their thesis that the legendary John Henry was just a mortal man who happened to be in the right place at the right time to become one of America’s most celebrated folklore heroes.
One study a few years ago, by a professor at the College of William and Mary, alleges that John Henry was one of hundreds of convict laborers that Virginia hired out to build railroads in the early 1870s.
Specifically, history professor and author Scott Nelson puts a new spin on the old folk ballads that have come down to the present in more than 100 different versions since the early years after the famed man-machine contest.
So, first the folklore, and then the history:
There are many versions of the song, but they tell the same general tale about a contest between a hammer-swinger, an African American laborer, and a steam drill which the man conquers at the cost of his life.
The contest involves a brutal job that black men performed in tunneling through mountain rock in building the southern railways after the Civil War.
Two men worked together boring holes for the dynamite that was used to blast the rock. One of them, the driver, swung a heavy hammer against a long steel drill. The second man, a “shaker” or “turner,” would either rock the drill side-to-side to push away bits of stone, or twist the shaft farther into the rock, between hammer blows.
One of the team members often sang a slow, rhythmic “hammer song” by which the two men coordinated their movements and worked to avoid injury.
According to one account, “The John Henry ballads do not take the hammer-song form, but instead describe the brutality of the job and the immense, but not quite superhuman skill of John Henry.”
Still, folklorists and scholars had pretty much agreed decades ago that the John Henry ballads were rooted in a real event that involved a real person. Steam drills of that era were cumbersome and dangerous contraptions that quite likely could be beaten by a pair of skilled men.
What they didn’t agree on, however, was whether John Henry was a convict or a highly paid free laborer. Nelson says the majority opinion was that the song’s hero was not a convict.
But records show that hundreds of men who worked and died because of the strenuous labor on the Big Bend Tunnel were Virginia State Penitentiary inmates rented out to the C&O company.
“Prison records suggest that in one year, in 1872, more than ten percent of the 380 black convicts who worked on the Big Bend Tunnel died of the work,” wrote Nelson.
And though some of the convicts died at the job site, most who died succumbed to scurvy, dysentery, and other diseases within days after being returned to the penitentiary “in horrible condition,” according to Nelson’s account.
When Richmond city officials reportedly got wind of reports that corpses were being buried on the prison grounds, they ordered the prison to bury the bodies outside the city limits. But the practice wasn’t changed until 1877.
So what does this have to do with John Henry?
One version of a crucial verse of the ballad states:
“They took John Henry to the White House, and they buried him in the sand; Now every locomotive that comes rumbling by says there lies a steel-driving man.”
And according to old, tinted prison photographs, one of the buildings was a big “white house” and the landscape reportedly included both a foreground rail yard and some sandy areas.
Could it be a scene from the song?
And what is the significance, as far as Talcott residents are concerned?
“It doesn’t matter one way or the other,” explained Ron Gore, a West Virginia University senior and Talcott native.
“The John Henry legend is safely ensconced in legend and myth. Nothing that can be said or written about the American folk hero is going to change that.
John Henry lives in the hearts and minds of those who believe that man can never be replaced by a machine…
“Whether John Henry was a convict, a free man, a slave or whatever, it doesn’t change what he did. He lived and died in Talcott, and he is one of the most popular American heroes who ever lived…That’s not going to change any time soon, no matter what anybody writes or says about him…He’s John Henry…”
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Top o’ the morning!
