i always admired to folk hero john irons,
Like other "Big Men" such as Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, John Henry also served as a mythical representation of a group within the melting pot of the 19th-century working class. In the most popular version of the story, Henry is born into the world big and strong weighing 330 pounds. He grows to become the greatest "steel-driver" in the mid-century push to erect the railroads across the mountains to the West. When the owner of the railroad buys a steam-powered hammer to do the work of his mostly black driving crew, to save his job and the jobs of his men, John Henry challenges the owner to a contest: himself alone versus the steam hammer. John Henry beats the machine, but exhausted, collapses and dies.
In modern depictions John Henry is often portrayed as hammering down rail spikes, but older versions depict him as being born with a hammer in his hand; driving blasting holes into rock, part of the process of excavating railroad tunnels and cuttings.
In almost all versions of the story, John Henry is a black man and serves as a folk hero for all American working-class people, representing their marginalization during changes entering the modern age in America. While the character may or may not have been based on a real person, Henry became an important symbol of the working class. His story is usually seen as an archetypal illustration of the futility of fighting the technological progress that was evident in the 19th century upset of traditional physical labor roles. Some labor advocates interpret the legend as illustrating that even the most skilled workers of time-honored practices are marginalized when companies are more interested in efficiency and production than in their employees' health and well-being. Although John Henry proved himself more powerful than the steam-drill, he worked himself to death and was replaced by the machine anyway. Thus the legend of John Henry has been a staple of American labor and mythology for well over one hundred years.
The truth about John Henry as the strongest man alive is obscured by time and myth, but one legend has it that he was a slave born in Missouri in the 1840s and fought his notable battle with the steam hammer along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in Talcott, West Virginia. A statue and memorial plaque have been placed along a highway south of Talcott as it crosses over the tunnel in which the competition may have taken place.
Coosa Tunnel and tracks between Coosa Tunnel and neighboring Oak Mountain Tunnel, possible Alabama sites of John Henry legend.The railroad historian Reagan C. Long found that there were multiple tunnels along the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Railway. Also, the C&O employed multiple black men who went by the name "John Henry" at the time that those tunnels were being built. Though he could not find any documentary evidence, he believes on the basis of anecdotal evidence that the contest between man and machine did indeed happen at the Talcott, West Virginia, site because of the presence of all three (a man named John Henry, a tunnel named Big Bend, and a steam-powered drill) at the same time at that place.
Another hypothesis is that the competition took place in Leeds, Alabama. It is said to have happened in Oak Mountain Tunnel, which is supposedly haunted by his ghost. Obviously there is a big difference in location, and even railroad. Many engineers will blow their horns in honor of John Henry before entering the north end of the tunnel.
The book Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend by Scott Reynolds Nelson, an associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary, argues that John William Henry, (#497) a prisoner in the Virginia penitentary, leased by the warden to work on the C&O Railway in the 1870s, is the basis for the legendary John Henry
Nelson points out that a steam drill race at the Big Bend Tunnel would have been impossible because railroad records do not indicate a steam drill being used there. Instead, he believes the contest took place at the Lewis Tunnel, between Talcott and Millboro, Virginia, where prisoners worked beside steam drills. Nelson also believes that an early version of the ballad that refers to John Henry's grave as being at "the white house", "in sand", and somewhere that locomotives roar, indicates that he was buried at the Virginia penitentiary, where unmarked graves have been found.
According to Nelson:
....workers managed their labor by setting a "stint," or pace, for it. Men who violated the stint were shunned....Here was a song that told you what happened to men who worked too fast: they died ugly deaths; their entrails fell on the ground. You sang the song slowly, you worked slowly, you guarded your life, or you died.
Retired chemistry professor and folklorist John Garst has argued that the contest instead happened at the Coosa Mountain Tunnel or the Oak Mountain Tunnel of the Columbus and Western Railway (now part of Norfolk Southern) near Leeds, Alabama on September 20, 1887. Based on documentation that corresponds with the account of C. C. Spencer, who claimed in the 1920s to have witnessed the contest, Garst speculates that John Henry may have been a man named Henry who was born a slave to P.A.L. Dabney, the father of the chief engineer of that railroad, in 1850.The city of Leeds is making plans to honor John Henry's legend with an exhibit in its Bass House historical museum and with a planned annual festival culminating on the third Saturday of September.
Though no documentary proof has emerged to rule out either theory, both Talcott and Leeds use their supposed connections with the legend in promotional and educational literature and events. Every year, on the weekend after the Fourth of July, the town of Talcott hosts a celebration known as "John Henry Days." The weekend includes many yard sales, a huge parade, fireworks, and a rubber ducky race against a paddle steamer.
According to family history of John W. Holder's descendants, Polly Holder was cook for the work crews at Talcott, West Virginia. John Holder was the crew foreman that broke the light hole through on the Great Bend Tunnel at Talcott.
