Appalachian History Series – Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster: Silica, Silence, and Memory in the New River Gorge
If you stand at the overlook near Hawks Nest State Park in Fayette County, West Virginia, the New River looks calm and distant. Freight trains slide along the riverbank, and tourists lean on the stone wall to photograph the gorge. Nothing in that view immediately tells you that one of the deadliest industrial disasters in United States history unfolded inside the mountain beneath your feet.
In the early 1930s, thousands of men cut a three mile water diversion tunnel through Gauley Mountain for Union Carbide. The tunnel delivered hydroelectric power to a metals plant at Alloy, but it also filled workers’ lungs with freshly fractured silica dust. Within a few years whole work camps were hollowed out by acute silicosis. Many of the dead were Black migrants from the Deep South whose graves were unmarked, moved, or lost.
Today a roadside marker, a small hillside cemetery, and a scattered paper trail of lawsuits, poems, and investigative reports are the main traces of what locals once called a village of death.
Digging a river through the mountain
The story began in the late 1920s, when Union Carbide and Carbon Company created a subsidiary called New Kanawha Power to harness the New River for electricity. Engineers planned to divert water from the river near Hawks Nest, run it through Gauley Mountain, drop it more than 150 feet in elevation, and feed a hydroelectric plant serving Union Carbide’s metallurgical works at Alloy.
Contractors broke ground on the tunnel in 1930, just as the Great Depression deepened unemployment across Appalachia and the South. Rinehart and Dennis, a Virginia based construction firm, took the job. They were expected to finish roughly three miles of tunnel in about two years, a pace that demanded long shifts, fast drilling, and little patience for delays. Record keeping from the period suggests crews were advancing between 250 and 300 feet of tunnel each week, an impressive rate for the time.
On paper the Hawks Nest work was classified as a civil engineering project instead of a mining operation. That distinction mattered. It meant the job could proceed without many of the dust control rules and safety expectations that had begun to emerge in metal and coal mining by the early twentieth century.
Migrant labor in a company controlled landscape
Fayette County itself was mostly white, but the tunnel crew was not. Out of an estimated workforce that may have reached 4,800 men over the life of the project, roughly three quarters were Black migrants recruited from the South. The remainder were mostly white locals or regional workers. Many men arrived in the gorge after hearing that Hawks Nest offered steady pay at a time when mills and mines were shutting down.
Company towns and labor camps sprang up around Gauley Bridge and along the river. Workers often lived in segregated quarters and were sometimes paid in script that tied them to company stores. Shifts of ten to fifteen hours underground were not unusual. In later interviews and congressional testimony, survivors remembered wage rates of about twenty five cents an hour, a wage that seemed attractive during the Depression but came at a heavy cost.
The workforce was fluid. Many men stayed only a few months, either because they were dismissed, became too sick to work, or simply walked away when they realized how dangerous the tunnel was. That churn helps explain why the death toll remains difficult to calculate.
The dust that turned water white
The sandstone inside Gauley Mountain was rich in almost pure crystalline silica. When crews began drilling and blasting, they discovered that the rock could be crushed and sold as a valuable industrial material for ferroalloy production. Instead of simply pushing the tunnel through and discarding the rock, Union Carbide and its contractors changed the work to maximize silica extraction.
Witness accounts and later investigations agree on key points. The tunnel was driven largely with dry drilling. Water, which can suppress dust, was rarely used on the bits. Ventilation was poor, and many men worked without masks or respirators even as managers and visiting executives wore protective gear. In some stretches, dust levels were so intense that workers emerging from the headings were described as ghost white and unrecognizable under a coating of powder. One congressional report later noted complaints that drinking water in the camp turned milky from airborne silica settling on every surface.
The result was a textbook case of acute silicosis. Instead of the slow lung scarring that many miners experienced over decades, Hawks Nest workers inhaled enormous quantities of freshly fractured silica in a matter of months. Many developed shortness of breath, chest pain, and coughing fits so severe they could not climb the hill from the tunnel to their barracks. Some died within a year of first exposure.
Company physicians often labeled the illness pneumonia or tuberculosis. Workers were told to go home and recover, even though silicosis has no cure. Men who grew too weak to work were put on trains south or, in the case of many Black laborers, buried quickly on nearby farms when local white cemeteries refused to accept them.
Lawsuits, hearings, and the search for a number
The exact death toll from Hawks Nest has been debated for nearly a century. Union Carbide’s own reports acknowledged 109 deaths, a figure that was later inscribed on a state historical marker near the gorge.
Families, lawyers, and independent researchers have always argued that the real number was higher. A 1936 investigation by the House Committee on Labor concluded that the tunnel had been built with what it called grave and inhuman disregard for workers’ lives and futures and cited a toll of at least 476 deaths from silicosis. Physician and historian Martin Cherniack, who compiled medical and legal records in the 1980s, estimated that about 764 men died, while some later commentators have suggested figures nearing 1,000 or more once unrecorded migrant deaths are considered.
More than 500 lawsuits grew out of the tunnel project. Many were consolidated into test cases in the early 1930s. Surviving records show that settlement amounts were small and racially unequal. White families tended to receive higher payments than Black families for the same disease, and lawyers took substantial percentages in fees. One major trial ended with a hung jury amid accusations of jury tampering and intense pressure from Union Carbide interests.
At the federal level, hearings on Hawks Nest helped push silicosis into the national conversation about occupational disease. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and public health officials cited the tunnel in campaigns to regulate dust exposure, and the case appeared in technical reports and safety journals for decades afterward.
Poems, songs, and a book of the dead
Because so many legal records were sealed or scattered, cultural responses have played an unusually large role in preserving the memory of Hawks Nest. In 1936 the poet Muriel Rukeyser traveled to Gauley Bridge, interviewed workers and widows, and read through court transcripts. Two years later she published The Book of the Dead, a cycle of documentary poems that wove testimony, engineering schematics, and personal stories into a portrait of the tunnel and the men who died there.
Rukeyser’s work circulated alongside protest songs about silicosis, including Josh White’s recording of “Silicosis Is Killing Me,” which gave musical form to the terror of a disease that slowly steals a miner’s breath. In the wider labor press, articles such as the People’s Press story often remembered under the headline “1500 Doomed” helped break the story beyond West Virginia and framed Hawks Nest as a national scandal rather than a local accident.
Later historians and journalists added new layers. Cherniack’s monograph The Hawk’s Nest Incident examined medical records and compensation files. Visual artists and photographers have returned to the gorge to explore what remains. In recent years, projects such as Raymond Thompson Jr.’s Appalachian Ghost have used archival images and contemporary photography to connect the almost invisible memorial landscape with the scale of the loss in the 1930s.
Graves on the hill and a marker in the trees
For years after the tunnel opened in 1936, there was little at Hawks Nest to show visitors what had happened. The hydroelectric project and the Alloy plant continued operating, and motorists on U.S. 60 or U.S. 19 might have heard only faint stories about a dusty tunnel and sick workers.
A state historical marker erected in the 1980s near the park now calls Hawks Nest Tunnel the site of West Virginia’s worst industrial disaster and repeats the official toll of 109 admitted deaths. Several miles away near Summersville, a small hillside cemetery contains the remains of workers whose bodies were moved when the highway was widened in the 1970s. Depressions in the soil mark the child sized coffins that held the commingled bones of dozens of men, most of them Black migrants who had been denied burial in local white cemeteries.
Digital memorials such as the Hawks Nest Names project attempt to restore individual identities to the dead by gathering names, addresses, and family details from scattered sources. The effort mirrors what genealogists and local historians across Appalachia often face when they try to reconstruct lives erased by company practices, poverty, and distance.
Hawks Nest in Appalachian history
The Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster sits at the intersection of several themes that run through Appalachian history. It was an industrial project that treated the landscape as a resource to be reshaped for distant corporate needs. It relied on a mobile, racially stratified labor force that mixed local white workers with Black migrants who faced both economic desperation and Jim Crow segregation. It exposed the gap between what engineers and doctors knew about occupational disease and what companies were willing to admit when profits were at stake.
For people traveling through the New River Gorge today, the site is easy to miss. The cliffs and river draw the eye, and the tunnel itself is hidden deep in the mountain. Yet the story of Hawks Nest links this scenic overlook to courtrooms, congressional hearing rooms, southern Black communities that received men home already dying, and farm fields that were turned into emergency burial grounds.
Remembering the tunnel and its workers adds another layer to the region’s industrial past. It connects coal camps and company towns to a different kind of extractive project, one that turned a river inside a mountain and left human costs scattered across Appalachia.
Sources & Further Reading
U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Labor. An Investigation Relating to Health Conditions of Workers Employed in the Construction and Maintenance of Public Utilities: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Labor, House of Representatives, Seventy-Fourth Congress, Second Session, Pursuant to H.J. Res. 449. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1936. https://books.google.com/books?id=OhHRhNWDGi4C.
Cherniack, Martin G. The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. https://bookscouter.com/book/9780300035223-the-hawk-s-nest-incident-america-s-worst-industrial-disaster.
Spangler, Patricia. Hawk’s Nest Tunnel: An Unabridged History. Proctorville, OH: Wythe North Publishing, 2008. https://www.amazon.com/Hawks-Nest-Tunnel-Unabridged-History/dp/0615212645.
Cherniack, Martin G. “Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. Last revised March 7, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/338.
“Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia exhibit section, “The Great Depression and New Deal.” West Virginia Humanities Council. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/exhibits/57/sections/960.
“The Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster: Summersville, WV.” New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. National Park Service, last updated February 15, 2022. https://www.nps.gov/neri/planyourvisit/the-hawks-nest-tunnel-disaster-summersville-wv.htm.
“Hawks Nest Workers Memorial and Grave Site.” New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/places/hawks-nest-workers-memorial-and-grave-site.htm.
“Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster.” The Historical Marker Database. Marker erected by the West Virginia Department of Culture and History, 1986. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=34417.
“‘1500 Doomed’: People’s Press Reports on the Gauley Bridge Disaster.” History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. George Mason University. https://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5089/.
Lancianese, Adelina. “Before Black Lung, The Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster Killed Hundreds.” Weekend Edition Sunday, National Public Radio, January 20, 2019. https://www.npr.org/2019/01/20/685821214/before-black-lung-the-hawks-nest-tunnel-disaster-killed-hundreds.
Jordan, Jennifer. “Hawks’ Nest.” West Virginia Historical Society Quarterly 12, no. 2 (April 1998): 1–3. https://archive.wvculture.org/history/wvhs/wvhs122.html.
Crandall, William “Rick,” and Richard E. Crandall. “Revisiting the Hawks Nest Tunnel Incident: Lessons Learned from an American Tragedy.” Journal of Appalachian Studies 8, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 261–283. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41446542.
Spencer, Howard W. “The Historic & Cultural Importance of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster.” Professional Safety 68, no. 2 (February 2023): 42–47. https://www.assp.org/docs/default-source/psj-articles/vpspencer_0223.pdf.
Wills, Matthew. “Remembering the Disaster at Hawks Nest.” JSTOR Daily, October 30, 2020. https://daily.jstor.org/remembering-the-disaster-at-hawks-nest/.
“Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster and Hawks Nest State Park.” The Clio: A Guide to Historic Sites. Entry created October 1, 2015. https://theclio.com/entry/16539.
“Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster.” Clio: Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster – Paid With Blood. https://theclio.com/entry/18734.
“Hawk’s Nest Names.” Hawks Nest Names project (database of workers and victims). https://hawksnestnames.org.
“Hawks Nest Tunnel Workers – Names and Records.” Hawks Nest Names. https://hawksnestnames.org/names.
Rukeyser, Muriel. The Book of the Dead. New York: Covici Friede, 1938; reprint, Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2018. https://wvupressonline.com/the-book-of-the-dead.
White, Josh. “Silicosis Is Killin’ Me.” Recorded 1936. In Josh White: Blues Singer (1932–1936). Columbia/Legacy, 1995. https://open.spotify.com/track/2RjjJB4PkFqZ7KgIlts4Eo.
Thompson Jr., Raymond. Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2024. https://literatibookstore.com/book/9780813198996.
“Other Sources – Hawk’s Nest Names.” Hawks Nest Names. Curated bibliography of materials on the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster. https://hawksnestnames.org/other-sources.
Author Note: I wrote this piece to connect the quiet overlook at Hawks Nest with the workers whose lungs and lives paid for the tunnel. I hope it helps readers see the New River Gorge not only as a scenic landscape but also as a place marked by silicosis, racism, and a long fight to remember the dead by name.