The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

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July 8, 2007

Legend of John Henry

Andrea Meador

TALCOTT — “Is he man or myth?,” Bill Dillon, president of John Henry Days, asked a captivated audience.

Some responded “man” and some “myth.”

“For those of you who said myth, I’ll have you thinking differently by the end of this presentation,” he continued.

For four of the students from Connecticut, he did just that.

Nick Parks, Andrew Sondheim, Christian Babikian and David Keith came to West Virginia recently with a Christian ministry group. After nearly a week in Summers County, they were rotated out with another group.

According to Dillon, the Appalachia Service Project, a Christian ministry that repairs houses for low-income families, asked him to do a speech every Tuesday night for a cultural night. Dillon’s job is to explain to these students about the legend of John Henry.

“When the canal lost its credibility, the railroad became popular, and around 1870, the C&O; Railroad was coming through the Appalachian Mountains,” he explained. “They decided that it would be better to go through the mountain rather than going around it. The tunnel, which is 16,520 feet long, took an enormous amount of labor, and one-fifth of the workforce was lost.”

Then the steam drill came along. According to Dillon, the contest began in the first 10 to 15 percent of the tunnel. In Guy Johnson’s book, “Tracking Down a Negro Legend,” a supposed witness of this event, Cornellius Miller, was interviewed. This book, along with the cemetery at Pie Hollow, is what Dillon uses to sway the audience.

“This proves that he was not a myth, because by the time this book was written, Miller was still young and hadn’t lost his mind,” he said. “Another thing is that we know for a fact that his wife, Polly Anne, is buried in the cemetery here. Now, it would be strange for her to be buried there and not her husband, so I believe that he might be buried there as well.”

After his speech, he demonstrated how steel was driven. He did this by driving a spike into a tree, with the help of volunteers from the audience. One, the shaker, had to face the tree while the other had to pound the steel spike into it.

“The shaker had to be shorter than the steel driver because it was easier for the shaker to get hurt if the steel driver was shorter,” he explained.

After the demonstration, people were allowed to look upon the Great Bend Tunnel and ask questions of Dillon. Parks, Sondheim, Babikian and Keith, who were getting their picture taken by the large picture of the stamp of John Henry, discussed the experience.

“I think it’s true after hearing this compelling speech,” Babikian said. “The demonstration was also pretty cool.”

Parks agreed and said he had learned a lot from being here.

“His speech was very interesting,” Parks said. “We were taught this story in school, but it’s good to know the whole story.”

The presentation ended with Dillon calling attention to the audience with a final note. Saying the story was exaggerated to a point where it lost all credibility, he left the audience to wonder, “What if it hadn’t lost its credibility? What if John Henry would have been the first African American hero?”

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