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Be an outsider.

If you take the time to stop in West Virginia's New River Gorge, our newest national park, and listen.

You may hear intertwined within the sound of bird song,

the wind billowing through the trees.

The whistle of a train. I'm Jason Epperson and today on America's national parks, the legend born from the

gorge that would echo through generations to come a man named John Henry. Following the new river through the gorge, the original Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Company was constructed between

1869 and 1872. In the early 1870s

construction of the C and O Railway along the Greenbrier and New Rivers employed thousands of workers.

Many of these men were African Americans who migrated to West Virginia in search of jobs after

the Civil War. Jobs on the railroad were labor intensive and low paying.

They required long hours,

and were at times extremely dangerous.

Railroad workers primarily use shovels, wheelbarrows, mules, and black powder to move millions of tons of rock and dirt to prepare the railroad bed.

Workers use the axe and the ads to cut and shape hundreds of trees into ties, bridge

timbers, and lumber for railcars.

They sweated in the hot summer sun and froze in the cold mountain winters as they worked to connect Tidewater, Virginia with the Ohio River Valley.

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