Hello.  I am new to this list, and my knowledge of VA history is pretty
spotty.  Nonetheless, I have a deep interest in aspects of it.

As some of you may know, historian Scott Reynolds Nelson, College of William
and Mary, has advanced the hypothesis that the legendary steel-driving man
was John William Henry, a black convict leased from the Virginia
Penitentiary, Richmond, to work on the construction of the C & O, 1868-73. 
Nelson represents John William Henry as dying at Lewis Tunnel, VA, probably
in 1871.  The evidence is presented in two publications (same evidence):

Nelson, Scott Reynolds. "Who Was John Henry? Railroad Construction, Southern
Folklore and the Birth of Rock and Roll." Labor: Studies of Working Class
History of the Americas 2. Summer (2005): 53-80. 

Nelson, Scott Reynolds. Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of
an American Legend. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 

I do not agree with the identification of John William Henry as the
legendary steel driver.  My candidate is John Henry Dabney, an ex-slave from
Copiah County (Crystal Springs), MS, who was working as a steel driver at
Dunnavant, AL, in 1887 when he raced a steam drill, won, collapsed, and
died.  I have presented some of the evidence in my paper

Garst, John. "Chasing John Henry in Alabama and Mississippi: A Personal
Memoir of Work in Progress." Tributaries: Journal of the Alabama Folklife
Association. Issue No. 5 (2002): 92-129

and I have since found much more, which I hope to include in the book I am
writing at present. 

My opinion is that the evidence for AL is much more compelling than that for VA.

Of course,  the time-honored, and very popular, story is that John Henry was
at Big Bend Tunnel, Summers County, WV.  This was endorsed by rivals Guy
Benton Johnson and Louis Watson Chappell in their books, *John Henry*,
published in 1929 and 1933, respectively.  There is a strong local John
Henry tradition in WV, and a large fraction of the recovered texts of the
ballad, "John Henry," place him at Big Bend, on the C & O, or both.  For me,
that is weak evidence.  Indeed, I believe that the incoherent testimonies
obtained by Johnson and Chappell from me who had worked on the construction
of Big Bend Tunnel come close to ruling it out as the John Henry site. 
Nelson rules it out on spurious grounds, that steam drills were not used in
boring it - Johnson and Chappell both knew this, but they accepted testimony
to the effect that a steam drill was brought to the Big Bend site for a trial.

Even if the legendary John Henry were John Henry Dabney, the Mississippian
who died in Alabama, there would be a strong connection with VA.

When Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney and his brother Philip Augustine Lee Dabney
moved their families to MS in 1835, they joined a group of Virginians in
Hinds County, MS, that continued in their VA customs and attitudes.  These
VA transplants and their children maintained close ties with their friends
and relatives left behind in VA.  When Gus Dabney's son Frederick Yeamans
Dabney decided to join the Confederate military, he and a few friends and
relatives went to Richmond to enlist.  Things didn't work out quite as
planned, and Fred wound up in Dement's (1st Maryland) Artillery for a while,
before he was detached and sent to Port Hudson, LA, as Chief Engineer (in
charge of defenses).

I have not presented or discussed any evidence here, pro or con, relevant to
VA or AL as the John Henry site.  My purpose is to introduce my interests
and to ask whether anyone on the list thinks they have ideas that might be
useful in getting to the truth about John Henry.

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