Building The Baseline

Building The Baseline

Back in the year of'1948 the Dismal Swamps stretched about 60 miles from the edge of Pinetown, North Carolina - clear over to the other side of Little Washington. Every tree in sight had been hacked down and hauled out of the swamps on a narrow gauge railroad spur that had been run 7 miles out into the swamps for the express purpose of hauling those trees out. That spur later became a short stretch of road called Gurkin's Switch. My Great Grandfather James David Gurkin drove that train, and my daddy, James Lewis Gurkin was a Southern Railroad man all of his working life. That spring of'1948, several trucks from the North Carolina Department of Prisons pulled up to the edge of the swamps and after all of the Prison Guards got their double-barreled, 12-gauge shotguns ready, the convicts on the chain gang were turned out and pointed to the swamps and told to "Git to diggin".

Two sets of prisoners consisting of 50 men in each set started digging a huge ditch. Here in the swamps the main ditches are actually canals and are called draglines. A parallel line of canals about 60 feet apart was dug, headed into the swamps, straight as an arrow. All of the dirt and muck removed from the draglines was thrown into the middle to create a roadbed. I cannot begin to describe the misery and hard life of the men on the chain gang. The working conditions were appalling. The pair of draglines was about 15 feet deep. The convicts had to work in two layers. The bottom crew would be in water all day long. Sometimes up to their waists. They would shovel the dirt and muck to a height of about 8 feet. Then the next layer of convicts would shovel it up to the edge of the roadbed. Then the last group of men would shovel and rake it mostly flat but humped up in the middle. Huge stumps from the old forest were wrestled by hand out of the dragline. Rain or shine. Heat of the summer or cold of the winter, those convicts pick-axed and shoveled. If a man didn't work hard enough he was dragged out of the ditch and chained to one of the trucks and beaten till he couldn't move anymore and then thrown into the back of a truck till time to go back to the prison camp. But the draglines kept moving. If a man died on the job he was put into the back of the same truck and the dragline kept moving. Today that road between those draglines is called The Baseline. It stretches as far as the eye can see, straight as an arrow through miles of the dismals. I take the long way around; I don’t drive the Baseline road.