Mack Caldwell, Mt. Sterling, Haywood County, North Carolina
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Mack Caldwell, of the Mt. Sterling community in Haywood County, North Carolina, was 53 years old when recorded in 1939. He was self-educated and was the owner of a country store.
[transcripption copyrigh Michael Montgomery and Paul Reed, 2017]
Disk 102b
[C = Mack Caldwell; I = Interviewer Joseph Hall]
C: Ready to go talking?
I: Yes.
C: Nineteen and seven, December the fifteenth, when all those boy, boys got blowed up up on Big Creek on this logging job making a railroad, I was a-working over at Laurel Fork, and the superintendent said for me to come on over there and do the shooting, I come over there on Saturday and before noon went up there and saw the superintendent, and I and him went out across the creek and got over to the shop over there and left the boys over there loading some holes, we left the shop and went off over to the old railroad, about the time we got over there we heared a dynamite blast go off, and just in about a second another'un went off, and we took behind some trees, rock flew all over us, and I told Mister Valentine, I said, “that’s, must be something went wrong,” I said, “that shot’s went off a- without any, giving any notice,” so I and him, we turned around and went back, got back over there and was found that shots had went off and killed six men, found two a-laying down the road, and the clothing of two of them was scattered all in the timber there and the foreman’s up the road something like a couple or three hundred yards blowed agin a big rock a-laying on the grade, the other boys crawling around there addled, so it took us something like two or three hours to, to get them all gathered up, or practically all evening, so we was still short three men, we came back in that night and got some chain blocks and went back up there and found one man fell down between the crevice of the rock and took a chain blocks and pulled, kept pulling him back loose, found one man laying down in there and picked up all the pieces and brought them all out.
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Then the next day everybody begin to wondering where, what caused the blast to go off, so we asked questions trying to find out, so finally we run across a fellow said that Jimmy Sutton brought over two gallons of whiskey to his brother there and the boys had all got a few drinks of liquors, caused the blast to go off, kill everybody, so later we got the railroad built and we logged up and down through there, and we always called this curve the Dead Man Curve.