By Mannix Porterfield
Steel-driving John Henry sweated less over the man-made steam drill than he has in pounding his way through the red tape of bureaucracy to get a park opened in his honor.
Three years after a $128,000 initial grant was approved, officials in Summers County are awaiting a green light to proceed with the initial phase of the proposed John Henry Park in Talcott.
“The holdup we have now is we’re awaiting a letter from the Division of Highways, we think with input from the state Historic Preservation Office, with a notice to proceed that will allow us to go to construction,” West Virginia University Extension agent Rick Moorefield said last week.
Summers County raised $32,000 as its share of the matching grant, and some of that was spent on engineering work, including environmental, wetlands and archaeology studies.
Once the letter is signed off by Charleston officials, Moorefield said, the lion’s share of the grant will be used to install an entrance.
“It’s kind of like having a house with no door,” he said.
“We’re getting ready to ask the county commission for permission to engage the engineers again to start some construction drawings to get the entrance planned. Once we get the notice to proceed on construction, then hopefully we’ll be ready to go and get that part of it done.”
A son of slaves who gained his freedom in the Civil War’s aftermath, Henry worked for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, earning a reputation as the strongest man on the line, drilling holes by hitting thick, steel spokes into rocks.
Legend has it that Henry matched his mighty biceps against a steam-powered drill a salesman hawked to out-drill any human on the C&O; payroll. About half an hour into their celebrated race, Henry had managed two 7-foot holes, or 14 feet, while the drill could muster a mere single, 9-foot hole.
As the story goes, the feat made Henry a hero but cost him his life, forfeited when a blood vessel erupted in his brain.
A bronze statue of Henry overlooks a winding, mountain road leading to Talcott, and it has been vandalized almost every year since it was erected.
In a recent homecoming, some youthful pranksters whitewashed the statue, but another group of youngsters cleaned off the vandals’ handiwork the next day, Moorefield said. Once the park is opened, an immediate goal is to move Henry to a more secure resting place inside, Moorefield said.
Henry’s legendary status has been the subject of debate for more than a century.
A fixture in American history, he has been the subject of various songs, including a lengthy version by the late Johnny Cash, and a modern twist as “a thinking man” who outraced a computer by the 1960s folk group, The Brothers Four.
“It’s rubbed off on me,” Moorefield said of the Henry legend.
“Listening to historians, Bill Dillon in particular — he has 16, 17, 18 ways to prove it, not with 100 percent certainty, but a fair amount of substantial evidence, if you will, that he was actually real. The thing is, he’s such a part of American folklore, real or not, he has that marketability that we’re really banking on as far as bringing tourists in.”
A fresh grant this year totaling $104,825 will require the county to fetch another $21,000 in matching cash en route to the only county-run park in Summers.
At this stage, engineers who performed a master plan and budget figure the park will ultimately run $2.45 million, but some say that two or three times that amount will be needed.
“My take is the cost they gave us is to physically build the park and structures, entrance and roads, that sort of thing,” Moorefield said.
“Then you’ve got the whole part of doing the interpretation of the legend. Once you build a visitors center, what are you going to put into it?”
The proposed park is spread over a 26-acre tract transferred to the county by CSX Corp. About all that has been do so far is the erection of a safety fence with a 50-foot right-of-way from the rail center line to the county’s property.
“You’ve got an active coal haulage line through there,” Moorefield said. “You want to make sure people aren’t wandering around. That’s totally understandable.”
Once the historic preservation people sign off, Moorefield noted, the county is all set to install trails, one of them entailing the conversion of an original rail bed.
“That grade is real flat,” Moorefield said. “That will give us a nice handicap-accessible trail loop.”
Another trail would finger into the nearby wetlands with plans to do an interpretation of plans as an educational feature.
“We want to make the park as educational as possible,” he said.
A visitors center likely will consume the bulk of the future budget, and ultimately the park is to feature an amphitheater to offer outdoor dramas and other venues of entertainment to generate some revenue.
“We’ve even had talk of commissioning a play to depict the John Henry legend,” he added.
— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com
