A few hours after I left the message for Walter Griggs he returned my call and was excited that someone, other than him, actually knew of the tunnel, let alone having an interest in the story...
Over the next half an hour he gave me the overall history of the tunnel...
Reconstruction officially ended in 1876 but some 5 years before that the C & O Railroad needed to get coal and other supplies from the deep water port of Richmond east and west thru Richmond by rail but there wasn't a way to get around Church Hill and given that Church Hill was heavily populated with the people who worked close by in the factories and ship yards the only way was to go under Church Hill...
The tunnel was begun in 1871 and completed and opened December 11th, 1873 and was 1 tad over 3900 feet long making it the 2nd longest tunnel in the country... There were problems with the construction because of layers of miocene clay (blue marl) which was kinda slimy and not all that stable... Lives were lost... At one point there was a cave in under 24th Street which swallowed several houses... Bottom line??? It was a slobber knocker and when it was opened had two drainage ditches on either side to allow the constant stream of goo and water to drain out of the tunnel...
But the Church Hill Tunnel was used until 1902 when a new viaduct was built to carry the trains south of Church Hill and running along the James River... It sat vacant until 1925 when it a decision was made to shore it up for limited use and to calm the residents who lived in houses above it who had suffered from years of settling issues, cracks in walls, creaking sounds and all the kind of stuff that keep folks up at night worrying...
On October 2, 1925 steam engine Engine 231 pulled several work cars loaded with laborers, tools and material into the tunnel for another day of shoring up... The engineer, Tom Mason... The fireman, B. F. Mosby... Sixty feet under 24th street the fireman noticed a few bricks fall from the ceiling and yelled, "Watch out, Tom... She's comin' in" and come in that tunnel did burying the entire train... Mosby, badly burned from the crushed firebox, jumped off the rear of the engine and worked his way under the work cars to safety... Many laborers did as well... Many didn't... The engineer didn't...
B.F. Mosby made it out but he was so badly burned that he died that night...
There was panic in Richmond that day as people were afraid that the entire tunnel was going to collapse and take hundreds and hundreds of Church Hill homes with it as well...
The following day the C & O set up steam shovels above the collapse but their weight caused even more collapsing so they were removed and laborers spent the next 9 days hand digging a shaft down 60 feet to the engine below... On that 9th day, Tom Mason's body was found in the cab of the engine and extricated...
The C & O then decided that further recovery would be dangerous and called off the operation... How many laborer's bodies that are still buried to this very day is debatable... Two known laborers were Richard Lewis and another man know simply as Smith... Back in 1925 in Richmond it was not uncommon for companies to take on "day laborers" and many folks reported at the time that there were others... These people were all black people... That was reality...
************************
So this is the most condensed version of the historical facts surrounding the Church Hill Tunnel...
Over the next few months I researched and researched and was on the phone a lot with Walter Griggs... He was great and sent me lots of copies of old newspaper articles and sources... Of course I had his the thesis on the tunnel that he wrote in college... As I learned everything that anyone knew at the time about the story, I began to write the song I had told Bruce Springsteen in my dream... The more I got to know the more I wrote... The final version of the song ended up with 29 verses... I recorded it in Brooklyn, NY at a friend's studio the Summer of 1996... It was so long that the only time I ever sang it thru was that night in that studio... It came in at just over 11 minutes long... Longest 11 minutes of my life sitting in a sound proof room with half a dozen folks watching me behind plate glass...
Glad to have written it... Glad to have it recorded... Gald I'll never have to do it again... Painful story but...
...the story doesn't end there!!!
We're just getting this story warmed up...
***********************END OF CHAPTER TWO***********************