North Carolina is unveiling a roadside historical marker that officially acknowledges a notorious construction accident — the Cowee Tunnel disaster near Dillsboro, about 50 miles west of Asheville.
The marker also commemorates a form of de facto slavery that was used for decades to build key infrastructure like railroads and roads across the South.
The sign is being erected beside the Tuckasegee River, where on Dec. 30, 1882, a boat carrying Black prisoners capsized. It was carrying them from their work camp across the river to the tunnel they were digging. Nineteen drowned.
"The convicts fell into the freezing cold water, and because of their metal shackles and chains, it was difficult for them to keep themselves afloat and prevent themselves from sinking," said David Walton, an assistant professor of history and the director of Global Black Studies at Western Carolina University.
According to historical reports, only one prisoner and a guard managed to climb ashore and survive. Divers recovered the victims' bodies days later, and they were buried in unmarked mass graves near the river.
The new marker is a part of a growing effort in western North Carolina to give the men some measure of their identities back and to underline a system that essentially extended slavery for decades after the Civil War.
“Incarcerated laborers” will be the title at the top of the sign.
“Much of the economy in North Carolina — really in the South, the former Confederacy as a whole — relied on slave labor,” Walton said. “So, after the Civil War, there was a labor crisis."
States quickly came up with a way to help fix that problem and re-exert control over the Black population: They ginned up laws — commonly known as the Black Codes — to boost the number of prisoners.
“They essentially criminalized Black bodies, Black people," Walton said. "So, they will be arrested and sentenced to hard labor for things like shooting dice in public, smoking cigarettes in public, being outside past dark, being unemployed.”
Once convicted, the prisoners could be leased out, as the 19 who drowned were to the Western North Carolina Railroad. Others were used by plantations, mines and just about any employer that needed cheap labor.
Their living conditions were often harsh, and there was little government oversight to prevent mistreatment.
Records are sparse, but more than 150 workers are known to have died working on the Western North Carolina Railroad, and the real number could be more than twice that.
Some were killed in accidents, some by illness in the squalid living conditions, some died by suicide, and others were shot while trying to escape.
“Some of these individuals are being charged with simple larceny and basically given a death sentence,” said Danielle Duffy, guest curator of an exhibit on the Cowee Tunnel disaster at Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Center.
The center is also helping coordinate the unveiling festivities for the roadside sign.
“The story of the Cowee 19 has been swirling around our area for a very long time, and it was always the Cowee 19,” Duffy said. “You know, 19 men drowned.”
So, for the exhibit, she says a central goal was to emphasize the victims' humanity and make them more than a number.
"It was taking this local story and trying to make those 19 men, place their names, make them individuals,” Duffy said. “I really wanted to start people out looking at the men and inviting them to come back and look at them again, as they go through the exhibit.”
Duffy dug through newly-opened prison records and other sources to learn as much as she could about them.
Their brief biographies will be at the beginning of the exhibit. Those will note that all of those killed weren’t men. One was a 15-year-old boy — Charles "Chas" Eason from Martin County,
“I have the least amount of information about him," Duffy said. "He was so young. He didn't yet make any kind of records. So, I just have what the penitentiary records provided for that he was five-foot-two and weighed 112 pounds when he was arrested for simple larceny."
The prison records concentrate on the inmates' physical characteristics, since the state was keenly interested in being able to recapture them if they escaped. But in some cases, she was able to flesh out more of their lives with things like census and marriage records.
“So, we have Alex Adams, who was from Washington County," Duffy explains. "He was actually convicted and sentenced for the same simple larceny as his father and his brother."
All three were sent to the prison labor camp at the Cowee Tunnel. Alex’s father, Gilbert, was apparently a respected member of the Lees Mill community in Washington County. Duffy found him listed as a witness for several marriages, and she also found some suggestion he fought for the Union. And all three — Gilbert, Alex, and Alex's brother Warren — were registered to vote, taking advantage of that relatively new right.
Duffy said she can’t help but wonder about the scene when Alex drowned.
“Were they there, were they on the boat? How did they react?" Duffy said. "They are wrapped in this brutal, terrible system and now they've just had to watch the loss of their loved one."
An archaeologist from UNC-Chapel Hill is planning to lead a group of WCU graduate students in excavating the site of the camp where the prisoners lived. They hope artifacts recovered from the dig can be exhibited at the Heritage Center.
But for now, Loran Berg, the Heritage Center’s collections manager, says little physical evidence of the convicts’ existence remains, except the 800-foot tunnel itself.
"One of the big problems with trying to develop an exhibit for this topic was that this was a period of time and event that people didn't particularly think of remembering at the time; didn't particularly want to remember it at the time,” Berg said. “And so there really wasn't anything saved… We don't have a single photograph of the site when it was working.”
So, instead of leaning on artifacts, the exhibit will try to convey a sense of the workers’ lives by putting visitors in dioramas.
“People can kind of step into the experience these individuals had at the time," Berg said. "We’re talking about the day-to-day life, like what their living situation was like, and then we also have one that’s going to be based on their work site."
The Jackson County NAACP Chapter applied for the state historic marker. A chapter founder, Enrique Gomez, noted the railroad was credited with opening the mountains to the outside world.
“We are actually benefiting as a community still at this very moment because of the labor of these men, who basically were not really remunerated," Gomez said. "Their lives were ended, and their families most likely never found out exactly what happened to them, or never saw them again."
Gomez said he hopes the new efforts to recognize the Cowee Tunnel disaster victims will boost a broader effort to recognize the role of convict laborers and diversity in the state’s mountain history and population.
“Us being able to tell this complex quilt of relationships and seeing how they interact can actually help inform and shape the narratives of Appalachia,” Gomez said. “Give it depth, give it more shape.”
Depth that includes more about the roles of the Black population, Native Americans, and more recently-arrived Latino communities that include many members of indigenous groups.
Eventually, the Heritage Center plans to help tell the story about the western North Carolina incarcerated laborers in other parts of the state.
Many of the Cowee Tunnel laborers actually came from counties in the eastern North Carolina. The Jackson County Arts Council gave the center additional funding to turn its exhibit into a traveling one after it closes.
The staff hopes to bring it to some of the communities that lost men to the frigid river — and to that system that prolonged slavery.
