Hawks Nest worker graves lay forgotten for decades
Jordan Barab
This Charleston Gazette article chronicles one of the most tragic stories in the history of workplace safety (or workplace murder): The death of 764 mostly African-American workers from exposure to silica while digging a tunnel in West Virginia in the early 1930's. You can also view a short video clip about the disaster (which also stars Rush Holt's father – who was then a Senator from WV): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUL6nnJO-6Q
It's taken from a 27 minute video called "Can't Take No More," which you can view on Google Video here.
February 24, 2008
Hawks Nest worker graves lay forgotten for decades
SUMMERSVILLE - As traffic roared along U.S. 19 atop a nearby embankment, Richard Hartman strolled through a narrow, trash-strewn finger of land nestled between the freeway and a turnaround for a dead-end secondary road.
Staff writer
SUMMERSVILLE - As traffic roared along U.S. 19 atop a nearby embankment, Richard Hartman strolled through a narrow, trash-strewn finger of land nestled between the freeway and a turnaround for a dead-end secondary road.
"It's a party spot for kids, and the highway crews get rid of their roadkill here," he said as he made his way toward three rows of hard-to-spot coffin-sized indentations in the ground.
There, Hartman kicked away a layer of rain-sodden leaves, revealing a corroded temporary grave marker bearing a postcard-sized sheet of lead foil. On the barely legible foil, spaces marked "birth," "death" and "cemetery" were left blank. The space reserved for "name" was marked only with a number - 62.
Lawrence Pierce
Maps found at a Division of Highways district office helped Richard Hartman find the relocated resting place of the Hawks Nest Tunnel workers. ..
Nearby, other temporary markers could be found marking the final resting places of unidentified occupants 53, 39, and a few of their co-workers.
"These people have haunted me for years," said Hartman. "This isn't where I expected their story to end, but here they are."
For Hartman, an adjunct history professor at the University of Charleston, the story began eight years ago, when he was researching a master's degree history project on the Hawks Nest Tunnel tragedy.
Hartman's research involved the degree of culpability the main contractor on the Depression-era construction project had in the deaths of hundreds of workers who helped build the tunnel.
That story began in March 1930, when Rinehart & Dennis of Charlottesville, Va., began work on a $4.23 million contract to dam the New River at Hawks Nest, bore a three-mile tunnel through Gauley Mountain, and build a 100,000-kilowatt power plant near Gauley Bridge.
A two-year deadline was given to complete the three-stage project, designed to power a new ferroalloys smelting plant and other Upper Kanawha Valley operations for the Union Carbide and Carbon Corp.
To meet the deadline, Rinehart & Dennis imported an army of workers, most of them black and from the South, eager to send home wages - even at 30 cents per hour - during the depths of the Great Depression.
Much of the Hawks Nest Tunnel was bored through silica-bearing sandstone, exposing workers to silicosis, a respiratory ailment caused by inhaling powdery particles of the rock.
While spraying the drill face with water was an often-used method of preventing the breathing of silica dust, wet drilling was not used in Hawks Nest Tunnel, since water would cause the drill bits to clog and require frequent cleaning, slowing down the tunneling process. The use of dust-blocking face masks was employed only by visiting state inspectors and company officials.
Silicosis was well known as an occupational health illness in the early 1930s, but it wasn't known to develop and become terminal as fast as it did on the Hawks Nest Tunnel project. Early cases were often misdiagnosed as pneumonia. Company doctors once termed the malady "tunnelitis."
By the time the tunnel was complete, at least 764 workers - about 75 percent of them African-American - had died.
The Hawks Nest tragedy produced congressional hearings that spawned legislation recognizing acute silicosis as an occupational lung disease worthy of workers' compensation payments. Rinehart & Dennis went out of business a few years after the project was complete.
In a settlement that followed a deadlocked civil trial, the families of deceased workers with silicosis received compensation payments of $600.
Hartman, a former administrator in the state Division of Tourism and Division of Highways, was pursuing a master's degree at Marshall to prepare for a second career as a history instructor when he began researching the Hawks Nest tragedy. During his research, he encountered a puzzle that nagged at him for the next seven years: Where were the dead workers buried?
Jim Crow laws of that era prohibited black workers from being buried in "white" cemeteries. Since there were no official black cemeteries nearby, some of the first African-American workers to die in the tunnel are believed to have been buried next to a slave cemetery behind Summersville Presbyterian Church, according to Hartman's research.
But the growing number of African-American deaths created the need to find a burial ground in the vicinity of the construction site.
"The contractors knew they were exposing people to something that would kill them, but they hired them anyway, but only for short periods of time," said Hartman. "That way, the workers could leave the area and die someplace far from the source of their illness. The average time a worker remained was 15 weeks. With the Depression, there were more than enough replacements."
But the Hawks Nest tunnel workers began getting sick within six to eight weeks on the job, making the need for an efficient way to dispose of the bodies even more acute for the contractor.
"Some of them were shipped home, and their arrival at the local train station may have been the first time their relatives learned that a husband or son was dead," Hartman said. "There were rumors that others were buried along the riverbank and covered with rock from the tunnel."
But the only mass burial site Hartman was able to document took place on a corner of a Nicholas County farm owned by the mother of Hadley C. White, who operated White's Funeral Home in Summersville when the Hawks Nest project was underway.
The farm was apparently used as a burial site to skirt segregation laws of the era that extended to death as well as life.
Hartman turned up a record of Hadley White testifying during a 1936 hearing that he had buried 58 to 60 Hawks Nest workers, including "33 Negroes on his mother's farm because there was no other place to bury them."
Those not buried on the Whites' farm, according to the funeral director, were sent back to their homes, mainly in North Carolina and Tennessee.
Hartman acquired a copy of a 1972 map detailing improvements planned for the upgrading of U.S. 19 to four lanes. On the map, a site near Summersville within the proposed construction zone for the widened highway was marked "unknown cemetery." Map notations indicated it contained 63 burials, all located on property that had once belonged to the White family.
While there was nothing on the map indicating the cemetery contained the remains of the African-American workers from the Hawks Nest Tunnel, Hartman suspected that it did.
With map in hand, he drove the stretch of U.S. 19 shown on the map, comparing it with the redesigned landscape as he traveled the four-lane highway. The spot marked "unknown cemetery" on the map was now a part of the widened highway and would have covered the southbound lanes of the road at a point between mileposts 41.5 and 42.
Maps found at a Division of Highways district office helped Richard Hartman find the relocated resting place of the Hawks Nest Tunnel workers. ..
"The graves had been moved to make way for the highway improvements," Hartman said.
To find where they had been relocated, he searched DOH records in Charleston and discovered that the graves, moved in 1972 by a now-defunct North Carolina firm, had apparently been put in the lot of an abandoned housing project bought as right of way for U.S. 19 improvements.
Hartman visited the Division of Highways district office in Lewisburg in search of maps or documents that would shed light on the relocation site. He found a detailed layout of the subdivision that had been bought as U.S. 19 right of way, and returned to Summersville.
After a few false starts, he found a site that matched the subdivision's unused residential road system, as depicted on the new map. He located Lot 6, site of the proposed cemetery relocation, but found only an undisturbed patch of maturing forest.
Disappointed but still in the search, Hartman met with Howard C. White, son of funeral director Hadley White. It turned out that Howard White, who took over his father's funeral home business, had been the funeral director who fulfilled a state law requirement by overseeing the removal and relocation of remains from the "unknown cemetery" on Hartman's map.
The younger White, who was 11 years old when the tunnel was completed, also remembered details about the burial of black tunnel workers on his grandmother's farm.
"They were buried in homemade wooden boxes made of inch-thick oak," said Hartman. "They were buried in their work clothes, in some cases still covered with the silica dust that killed them."
Oak boards marked the head of each gravesite, but none of the markers listed a name.
After resting at the White farm for 40 years, the remains were disinterred and transported to the planned residential subdivision along U.S. 19, not far from Summersville Lake.
Although White had never been to the re-burial site, he directed Hartman back to the roadside subdivision along U.S. 19.
Hartman returned to the site with David Smith, a Nicholas County teacher and videographer who had joined the University of Charleston professor in the search for the cemetery.
While the two wandered through the debris-strewn woods at the end of a narrow paved road, Smith spotted the glint of something metallic, 10 or 15 yards into a patch of brush and young trees.
When the two approached the shining object, it turned out to be an aluminum stake bearing a small metal frame - one of four or five temporary grave markers still in place.
Highway records indicate that the "unknown cemetery" contained 63 graves while the relocated cemetery contains only 34 or 35. Hartman said the discrepancy in numbers remains unexplained, but it's possible that a number of the relocated body remnants were consolidated into single burials. Poor mapping may also have played a role, and the number of deaths reported varies widely in both historical and anecdotal accounts of the Hawks Nest tragedy.
"I've wanted to find these men for years, both to solve the mystery of where they were buried and, if nothing else, to apologize for the way they were treated," Hartman said. "I expected to find a larger cemetery that wasn't overgrown with brush and littered with trash that maybe had some kind of a marker explaining how these men died, but here they are, in an unmarked graveyard next to a highway. These people just disappeared."
Hartman said he had provided information on the site to the Division of Culture and History so that at least its presence will be known, should someone want to restore, preserve and interpret it.
"Progress and bigotry killed them," Hartman said of the unidentified Hawks Nest workers. "Even after their deaths, these men received very little hospitality in West Virginia. The part that makes me ache is that they didn't receive any better treatment in 1972 than they did 40 years earlier."
While Hartman is convinced he has solved the "where" part of his Hawks Nest mystery, he hopes someone will eventually be able to solve the "who" component.
"A record that identifies who these people were may be out there somewhere," he said.
For now, he said, he can take some level of fulfillment from having discovered their resting place.
"I've found them," he said. "I'm not haunted anymore."
To contact staff writer Rick Steelhammer, use e-mail or call 348-5169.
http://wvgazette.com/News/200802230569--
Jordan Barab