Stories tell how on the night of his birth, “forked lightning cleaved the air and the earth trembled like a leaf.” Hence his prophetic first words, as recorded in the never-ending Ballad of John Henry:
John Henry was a little baby, uh-huh, Sittin' on his mama's knee, oh, yeah, Said: ''Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O road Gonna cause the death of me, Lawd, Lawd, gonna cause the death of me.”
After his first meal John Henry is said to have walked out of the house in search of work and his destiny with the C&O Railroad. The setting for the climax of this tall tale is West Virginia in 1870. The occasion is the construction of the Big Bend Tunnel on the Chesapeake & Ohio line near Hinton. The rest is, well, history of a sort:
With the invention of the steam drill, the job of laying track for the railroad was fast becoming mechanized. The company working from the far end of the Big Bend Tunnel used those steam drills. But John Henry's company, tunneling through from the opposite side of the mountain, continued to rely on brute manpower. There was much boasting about which was faster, so it was decided to stage a contest to settle the matter. A prize of $100 was put up and John Henry was matched against the steam drill. When the contest was over, John Henry had drilled two holes seven feet deep, while the steam driller had drilled only one hole nine feet deep. The winner-John Henry. John Henry, however, died that night in his sleep of a ruptured blood vessel.
After that, local folk often reported seeing John Henry's ghost hammering away in the mountains. As late as 1883 the railroad had difficulty recruiting men to work in the area, because men thought they heard John Henry's hammer ringing on the rock.
The theme of Man vs. Machine was so pervasive in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that as the John Henry tradition moved west, other scenarios were substituted for tunnel, drilling. As a result, accounts have been written and many a folksong sung about John Henry as the champion cotton picker, timber cutter, and other big-worker jobs.
Regardless of his wanderings, John Henry, the Steel Drivin' Man, is West Virginia's own. A statue memorializing him stands tall on a mountain overlooking the portal to Big Bend Tunnel on a stretch of track near the town of Talcott.
Note: These archival articles are presented exactly as they appeared at the time of the issue in which they appeared. As such, all quotes, as well as references to temporal facts, artifacts and other items are contemporaneous to the date of original publication.