On this day in 1930 work began on the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia. The tunnel was to divert water from the New River to a hydroelectric power plant in order to produce electricity for a metals plant at Alloy, West Virginia owned by Union Carbide.
Hundreds of men seeking work of any kind during the darkest days of the Great Depression came to the site to dig, most of them African-Americans. The drilling was through rock that contained a lot of silica, leaving the men covered in fine white dust at the end of the work day. That dust, mainly silica, was so thick inside the tunnel that it was nearly impossible to see and to avoid while breathing. There was little to no dust control or use of safety equipment, like personal breathing protection. As a result many of the workers at the site contracted silicosis. Of the 2900 men who worked inside the tunnel, 764 were killed by silicosis, a majority of them African-American.
So many people died at the site that a funeral home in Summersville set up a burial site in an open field on a nearby farm, the Martha White farm, know known as the Hawk’s Nest Workers Memorial Cemetery.
(Photo of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel memorial by Jarek Tuszyński – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103008154)
