from the Rabun County Historical Society
Working on the Tallulah Falls Railroad Meager Wages, Women Hewing Crossties and Frozen Overalls By Dick Cinquina
R
abun County was remote and isolated, populated by subsistence farmers scratching out a living on hardscrabble mountain land. The Tallulah Falls Railroad opened Rabun and the surrounding region to the outside world. The TF also brought badly needed jobs. Working on the TF involved backbreaking labor for paltry wages, typically about one dollar per day. But mountain men and women eagerly sought railroad jobs, since meager pay was better than no money at all. Much of the following narrative about railroad jobs and the men and women who did them is drawn from oral histories compiled by the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in Mountain City. Picks, Shovels and Mule-Pulled Scrapers The TF used some of the roadbed prepared by the defunct Blue Ridge Railroad decades earlier.
Preparing miles of new roadbed for tracks was the first work offered by the TF. Carving a route through mountainous terrain was done laboriously with picks, shovels and scrapers pulled by mules. When rock outcroppings were encountered, “cuts” were blasted. Will Seagle, who worked on the TF from the Georgia state line to Franklin, recalled the time when dynamite used to blast a cut accidentally exploded. “I seed him (one of the workers) a-goin’ up (in the air)…I run and jumped in the river and got him out… he didn’t have a rag nor a shoe on him. Flesh was a-dropping off of him. Boy, he was pitiful. He lived till midnight and then died.” “I drove steel (making holes for the dynamite),” Seagle continued. “There was two of us. There should be a right-hand man and a left-hand man. There was a colored man there, and he was a left-hand man, and the boss asked me, ‘Mr. Seagle, do
Rail tongs allowed workers to pick up and move heavy sections of rail. Photo courtesy of Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center
Dick Cinquina holds graduate degrees in history and journalism, making his work for the Rabun County Historical Society a natural fit for his interests. He is the retired president of Equity Market Partners, a national financial consulting firm he founded in 1981. In addition to writing monthly articles for the Georgia Mountain Laurel, Dick helped produce the Society’s new web site and is involved with the renovation of the group’s museum. After vacationing in this area for many years, he and his wife Anne moved to Rabun County in 2018 form Amelia Island, Florida.
80 GML - May 2021