1880 - 1900
Goal 6: Becoming an Industrial, Urban Society
The learner will interpret economic trends of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The completion of the railroad in 1880, up the Swannanoa Gap and over Old Fort Mountain, was a monumental task connecting remote WNC with the rest of the new industrial America. The majority of the labor to build the railroad came from prisoners who were often African-American. There were numerous tragic accidents in the dangerous work to build the tunnels and lay the tracks on steep terrain. Their efforts are important as they opened up the western region to a whole new prosperity. Up the steep mountain grade came influential people from all over the world and with them the working class Blacks and Whites needed to tend to their needs.

The African American community made many painstaking gains from 1865 forward—the right for males to vote, the right to own property and businesses, and the right of free association. By 1880, churches, private schools, and social institutions provided opportunities for crucial networking. Soon followed businesses and skilled laborers. Miller Construction Company, owned by James Vesper Miller, built numerous still prominent buildings including the downtown police station, YMI, and St. Matthias Episcopal. James and his wife Violet owned a large farm in the area of Asheville now known as Emma. James Wilson, nephew to Isaac Dickson operated an undertaking business. By 1895, businesses began to sprout along Eagle Street and throughout the area.

Still, the majority of the Black population were involved in many of the same types of service sector work such as maids, cooks, laundresses, laborers as they had been before emancipation.

	Postcard of unidentified convicts working on the railroad. NC Collection, Pack Memorial Library, Asheville, NC

—Rebecca Harding Davis, Cory F. Poole,
History of Railroading in Western North Carolina, page 6

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