What is a Steel Drivin' Man?
By Dan Shaver

Less than a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation, the insatiable appetite of the railroads drew former slaves into work crews to create the tunnels needed to expand their sprawling tracks across the American continent. Living under conditions scarcely better than their days in slavery, they labored in hard, dirty, cramped and life-threatening circumstances to drill through the living granite heart of the Appalachians.

A steel driver worked with a partner. The partner held in place a steel shaft with a cutting head that the "driver," often working from awkward angles, forced into the native stone with repeated strikes of his hammer. Once the shaft had cut a hole sufficiently deep, a blaster would pack the hole with explosives and blow another notch into the tunnel. From the isolated, brawling. death-defying life of these camps, stories arose - some true, some imaginary - to inspire, amuse and entertain the workers. The most enduring of these, in song and myth, is the Legend of John Henry....

Last updated: December 1998