The Road

The Mountain Novels #4

by John Ehle

Originally published in 1967, The Road  is epic historical fiction at its best. At the novel's center is Weatherby Wright, a railroad builder who launches an ambitious plan to link the highlands of western North Carolina with the East. As a native of the region, Wright knows what his railway will mean to the impoverished settlers. But to accomplish his grand undertaking he must conquer Sow Mountain, "a massive monolith of earth, rock, vegetation and water, an elaborate series of ridges which built on one another to the top."

Wright's struggle to construct the railroad—which requires tall trestles crossing deep ravines and seven tunnels blasted through shale and granite—proves to be much more than an engineering challenge. There is opposition from a child evangelist, who preaches that the railroad is the work of the devil, and there is a serious lack of funds, which forces Wright to use convict labor. How Wright confronts these challenges and how the  mountain people respond to the changes the railroad brings to their lives make for powerfully compelling reading.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, American, Southern

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

John Ehle (1925-2018) grew up the eldest of five children in the mountains of North Carolina, which would become the setting for many of his novels and several works of nonfiction. Following service in World War II, Ehle received his BA and MA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he met the playwright Paul Green and began writing plays for the NBC radio series American Adventure. He taught at the university for ten years before joining the staff of the North Carolina governor Terry Sanford, where Ehle was a “one-man think tank,” the governor’s “idea man” from 1962 to 1964. (Sanford once said of Ehle: “If I were to write a guidebook for new governors, one of my main suggestions would be that he find a novelist and put him on his staff.”) Ehle was the author of eleven novels, seven of which constitute his celebrated Mountain Novels cycle, and six works of nonfiction. He had one daughter, actress Jennifer Ehle, with his wife Rosemary Harris, also an actress.

Reviews

[Diane Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

True to form, Ehle had me in the Appalachians in 1876. This time Weatherby Wright, grandson of Mooney in The Land Breakers, had me building a railroad track to connect NC and Tennessee to make it possible to get goods and livestock to markets without a 2 week journey to get there. I slogged through mud and rain and snow, in one case oozing white clay. Not to mention blasting through rock to make tunnels. The backbreaking physical labor was provided by prisoners on loan from Raleigh, working 14 hour days on nothing but mush, cornbread and greens 3 times a day. The mountain residents weren't much help because they notoriously did not like being told what to do. I got to know and respect a lot of the prisoners, most of the supervisors, and the mountain herself, who resented being injured and manipulated and exacted a heavy toll for this abuse. Ehle usually has an unimaginable scene of violence and death in his books, this was no different. Here, a locked boxcar with female prisoners caught fire and careened down the mountain.

For lightness, humor, and common sense, we got to know Henryanna Plover, who was loved by 2 men, but was woman enough to know her own mind and refused to settle for less than her dreams.

If I ever take a trip through these mountains again, by road or by train, I won't take for granted the effort and lives expended to make my travel easier.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

"He judges all of us by the same rod. And what will He do to those who friction what He's made, who grate agin it, who anvil it, who tear it, who blast it?"

Another magnificent novel by Ehle, who is swiftly replacing Faulkner for me as deserving the throne of the most evocative author of the South.
In order by the novels' chronologies, this is the fourth of Ehle's "mountain novels", a 7-volume fictional take on life in western North Carolina's Appalachian remoteness. The first two novels were about early settlers, the third focused on the Civil War, and this one focuses on the monumental effort to build a railroad over the mountains to link east and west. The novels focus on the King and Wright families, with The Road's main character Weatherby Wright.
Taking place beginning in 1877, Wright is the chief engineer on the project to build a railroad over and through a mountain. His workers are almost all convicts and almost all black, men and women (through a clerical error) alike. The novel's focus shifts back and forth from the sheer magnitude of the task at hand to how it affects the various characters, especially Wright, his assistant Cumberland, Moses the giant convict, and the mountain girl HenryAnna, a kind of nymph-like goddess who beguiles everyone she meets. There is much psychological depth here in this novel of literal man-versus-nature to the point where the convicts are as engaged in the obsessive challenge of defeating the mountain as Wright is, race means nothing and nor does life. Lots of people die. There are cave-ins, outbreaks of disease, accidents, fires, escapes, and wolves.
Unlike Faulkner, though, Ehle does not hesitate to be gentle and touching alongside the brutality of the situation: there are little love stories, moments between free and convict, city boy and backwoods girl, and so on, all set against the love/hate story of Wright versus the Mountain.

[Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, capturing something mysterious about the NC mountains and my ancestors, the mountain people. I confess to a bias toward this book and the author: The scenes he describes so well, the speech of the people takes me back to my childhood, my grandparents, aunts and uncles. This is the epic story of building the first railroad through the mountains, and the man who led the project,opening up a way for mountain people to take their produce and products to market more efficiently. In addition, it opened the way to bringing medicine, education and tourists to the mountains. But the cost was very high.

Recommended by my cousin Erwin, who grew up near Asheville.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great story, just amazing characters and the day by day struggle to build the first railroad into North Carolina mountains. This is the second book in the series and I can’t wait to get into the next book. His writing and insight into the mountain people is fascinating, sometimes sad, sometimes funny and always frustrating.

[David Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to read the first novel in John Ehle’s mountain series because it’s set in a place I often inhabit (and where I am self-isolating during the pandemic) and because I knew Ehle to be a skillful writer, having reviewed one of his novels years before. The Land Breakers was a spectacular success, one of those moments when a novelist exceeds even his own high reach. It took place in an almost unimaginable period of North Carolina history (though Ehle imagined it), the 1780’s, when the area had hardly been developed at all.

The Road takes place a century later, but seems to be located in roughly the same spot, and includes a couple of families from the previous novel (Ehle has written eight novels in the series in all; apparently one family continues throughout). But because it concerns a specific subject—the building of a railroad line that would connect the mountains with the lowlands, even just as far back as Old Fort or Morganton, which are right at the base—it seems more self-consciously historical than The Land Breakers, as if Ehle had done research and it almost hampered him. The Land Breakers is brilliant work of the imagination. The Road is a historical reconstruction. It isn’t a great novel, but is fascinating in its own way.

There is one man, Weatherby Wright, whose vision it is to create this railroad line; he’ll finish it or die trying. I’d almost call him a Captain Ahab figure, except that he’s a sympathetic and winning person, and all the people who work for him love him. There are various sub-plots, but it’s ultimately Wright’s novel, and in that way it’s a sad book. He got the railroad built, and it also broke him.

He wasn’t building the road for his own profit. As we found at the end of The Land Breakers, there was no way for mountain people to get produce or anything else to a market where it could make good money. That novel ends with a long trek in which a number of farmers try to take livestock and other items to the market in Morganton. The trip is a disaster, and the novel ends badly. It seems at that point that mountain people are condemned to poverty.

Unless a railroad connects them to the lowlands.

North Carolina was a poor state in 1880, and there wasn’t much money for the project, so it was forced to use convict labor, under dreadful conditions. The men lived on beans, cabbage, and cornbread. Female convicts had come along to cook the food and wash the dishes. Predictably, both convict groups were predominantly black. And on Saturday nights—weirdly, for so puritanical a place—they were allowed to mingle together in a wooded area and have sex. That was their recreation. Ehle is quite realistic, though not prurient, about sex in both of these novels. That’s one of the things I admire most.

The novel’s most winning character is a woman named HenryAnna, one of Ehle’s country women who is beautiful, mildly flirtacious, sure of who she is, verbally inventive almost to the point of being poetic. She is exactly like a wonderful female character in The Land Breakers, and is a descendant of that woman. I found it odd that two women even from the same family would be so much alike, a hundred years apart. But the creation of these women is a marvel.

The men’s job is brutal. They create tunnels through various places in the mountains, and that work is both dangerous and difficult: even breathing the damp dusty air is not good for them. A major cave-in is absolutely horrific. Also toward the end, there’s a flu epidemic that almost wipes the project out. Wright has the choice of shutting the project down and doesn’t do it, and that is the fact that finally breaks him. He loved the men who worked for him, and felt he had let them down. Reading about that flu epidemic in the midst of our pandemic felt eerily familiar. It was almost more than I could take.

One charming aspect of the book is that there are young men called Mountain Boys who do various jobs for the project. In one way they’re not good workers, because they’re independent and hate to be told what to do. But they hunt for meat to feed the workers, and when Wright himself is lost in a cave for a long period of time, having broken his leg, they go out looking for him. They search for people strictly by intuition, like the process of dowsing for water, but after a period of time all of the Mountain Boys were standing at the same cave. And though it was infested with rattlesnakes, one went in after him.

This book seems to be part tall tale and part historical document, a much different book from The Land Breakers. But I liked it for itself.

www.davidguy.org

[Beverley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a wonderful book from beginning to end. The language was beautiful--almost like poetry. John Ehle is my new favorite author.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this book 6 stars if I could. The writing is lyrical and the story is so compelling. Based on the true story of the Western Carolina railroad being built between Morgantan, NC, and Swannanoa, NC, the actual history is enough, but Ehle's understanding of the people of the Southern Appalachians enriches this story immensely. The writing is so extraordinary that I really can't praise it enough. There were moments when I just had to savor every word. How did I not know about John Ehle before hearing that he died? On to the next in the series.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Ehle's 'The Road' is a powerful, fictional account of the construction of the Western North Carolina Railroad over the Blue Ridge in 1879 in order to bring 'civilization', commerce and opportunity to the backward mountain communities east of Asheville. The chief engineer (and chief shareholder and landowner) James William Wilson took on the challenge of what the Morganton Railroad Depot describes as the 'monumental engineering and construction efforts to build multiple switchbacks and tunnels' and bridges since 'the Blue Ridge escarpment created an insurmountable barrier'. The author grew up in Asheville and one can't help but speculate that he must have heard some of the stories of 'The Road' growing up.

The book features the railroad men (with James Wilson portrayed as Weatherby Wright), the 500 mostly male and mostly black convict laborers, and the hillbilly families in an uneasy equilibrium all up against the mountain, which is a menacing female character itself. The dangers and construction problems; the injuries, illnesses and deaths, the opposition of preachers and the uncooperative nature of mountain men all are depicted in somewhat stand-alone chapters that all culminate in first a cave-in, the completion of the Swannanoa Tunnel, the longest of the tunnels, a unique Christmas service and a dreary fictional end.

It takes awhile for the book to grow on you; in fact, I almost abandoned it a few times near the beginning because of the harsh, disturbing grittiness; the seemingly unrelated chapters; too much focus early on a young seductress and all the dialects and superstitions of the ex-slaves and mountain men. (I know, it's the dialect and superstitions that makes Huckleberry Finn great....) It also reminded me early on as a tougher, less romantic version of 'The U.P. Trail by Zane Grey which is mostly about the building of another railroad out West. The malevolence in Zane Grey's book comes from bad guys and corrupt financiers and politicians, whereas the malevolence in John Ehle's book is the mountain itself. Thanks to goodreads and Matt for his review of John Ehle's classic 'The Landbreakers' for helping me find this book, which is definitely worth a read.

[Sydney E · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was heavy but very beautiful at the same time. I couldn’t put it down, especially in the second half - would they do it? Would they finish the Road? Weatherby’s struggle with how to move forward was palpable throughout. His love of the mountain people was sometimes the only thing driving him, especially as their difficulties multiplied. A true story too, which had me google mapping a lot of the places mentioned in the book - the fact that Hurricane Helene has just pummeled this exact area is sooooo heavy. I can’t imagine what people are dealing with. Mutual aid will be the only option to move forward for many, many people in the area - we must lean on each other.
Some favorite lines:

“But I love you, too. I love you because of so many different reasons that I love you in different ways. It’s like a spring or a place in the creek where children have dropped colored stones, and as the water ripples, you don’t know, you can’t say what color it is.”

“I’ve got so much to be pleased about it burdens me.”

“He stopped on the path and stood there a minute, listening to the birds and staring off at the farmed mountains, speculating in his mind about the outland places of the earth and wondering how men there could know themselves if they had no mountains to judge themselves by.”

[Michael Clifford · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a historical fiction account of the building of the Western NC Railroad from Old Fort to Asheville, NC. The mountain region was historically isolated as the train never reached the area from the rest of North Carolina. The Civil War halted all railroad construction in NC and then a scandal in the 1870s robbed NC of the money to build the railroad. The railroad was delayed for another 10 years and then was built with convict labor.
This book does a nice job describing the incredible task of building the railroad through the mountains. Something like 7 tunnels had to built that incorporated the first use of nitro in the southeast. The author also does a nice job of developing some characters from the mountain region with a particular emphasis of their mountain ways.
This book was written in the 1960s. I found the writing to be a bit difficult to stay engaged - not sure it that is a sign of the times or the particular author. In any case, it was an enjoyable book about the history of where I live. I have it on my list to drive or walk the train route which is still in use today - 140 years later!

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, another classic! Second in the “mountain series”. The first being “ The Land Breakers”. “Lion on the Hearth” is the third and I’m reading it right away. If you have any interest in the Appalachain’s (the oldest mountains in the world?) and their people you’ve got to read Ehle. Even if you don’t, these are great books. This guy really knows his subject and is such a good writer, describing things ‘just so’. The details of behavior and small details of daily life are so well written, often leading you to form your own view of an incident or situation. He knows how to keep the plot rolling along and always has a few surprises around the corner.

Ehle is a master of his genre, an American treasure.

“Ehle was elected to the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. He has also received awards including: the Thomas Wolfe Prize, the Lillian Smith Book Award, the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities, and the Mayflower Award”.

Check him out.

[Caleb Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though I read all of Ehle's 'Mountain Novels' in order, this review comes after finishing all seven books. By far, The Road was Ehle's strongest, in my humble opinion. I recently returned to live in North Carolina, and since reading The Road, every trip to the western part of the state has me casting a deeper gaze on the NC countryside from Morganton to Asheville, trying to capture glimpses of the landscape painted by Ehle's words. I've also found myself trying to find a train that will allow me to pass through teh Swannanoa tunnel, as well as all the other markers along the road.

For me, this is the lasting impression of this book. Because it is rooted in the historical account of using prison labor to build the railroad into the Western NC mountains, I am now deeply interested in more accounts of this feat. Unfortunately, I cannot imagine the actual story will be as beautifly written.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Number 2 is Ehle's mountain series was fascinating in its history of building a railroad in the NC mountains. It did drag a little for me but certainly reflected the sheer torture the men (and women) went through. I had never realized convicts were used for this work. Weatherby's wife called them slaves and she was right...it was just a horrible slavery used as *punishment*. The dialogue is true to the NC mountains. I'm happy to have discovered this gem of a series about my home state.

[Rob]

This was a very meaningful book to me, in that we roughly followed the path of this Road (railroad) whenever my father drove our family to the mountains of NC. We also sometimes took the Southern RR up the Ridgecrest Grade to Asheville or descended to our home in Salisbury. The book more than hints at the effort and suffering of the men that built it. Frightening at times.

[Faye Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written about the coming of the railroad to the North Carolina mountains in the 1870s, this book very vividly describes the hardships and difficulties faced along the way. A very gritty, down to earth picture of the lives of the mountain people and the flatlanders who attempted to bring about changes, John Ehle brings it all together with skill.

[Sarah Toppins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a historical novel about building a train track through the Smokey Mountains. It's a continuation of Ehle's mountain novels - number four chronologically out of seven. It's less about the mountain people and more about the process (using convicts for the work) and the hardships (accidents and illnesses resulting in many deaths).

[Janet Minner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like historical fiction and what made this even better is the fact that I live 20 minutes from where this takes place. I've often ridden my bike at the intersection of the Swannanoa Gap. Imagining how this happened and the brutality of the endeavor was eye opening. Of additional interest is the fact that they're considering bringing back passenger travel to Asheville via train.

[Jennifer Morefield · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this account of road building in the late 1800's in North Carolina was very interesting. Weatherby, who was from this mountain area, dreamed of opening his homeland and the people who lived there, to the rest of the world. It told of the sacrifices including that of human life to see the road's completion. To save money, many of the workers were convicts who opted to build roads rather than sit in prison. Also, many of the workers were mountain folk. This was a great story and worth reading.

[Wendy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally finished. This book pales in comparison to the others I've completed in Ehle's Mountain Series. It just seemed too long and drawn out. I will never look at any tunnel the same way again though.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though my Uncle edited Ehle’s “Trail of Tears”, it’s taken me this long to actually read any of Ehle’s work. This did not disappoint- I really felt like I was in the hollers beyond Old Fort. He really had a way to set the setting. I’d like to read the other books in this series.

[CJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Active and alive, fantastic read!

[Chris Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fine historical novel. Occasional descents into melodrama and mysticism were disappointing, but did not ultimately detract from the novel.

[Mike Barker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting because 1) trains and 2) close to where I live now. Nice balance between train stuff and cultural exploration.

[Jill Cordry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these historical novels by John Ehle. This is based on the true story of constructing a railroad in the Appalachian mountains.

[Press 53 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book four of John Ehle's (Ee-Lee) seven-book Appalachian series that Ehle called his "mountain books." The Road tells the story of building the railroad through and around the Western North Carolina mountains, mostly with convict labor, that is overseen by Weatherby Wright, decendant of Mooney Wright from the first book in the series, The Land Breakers. Onec again the mountains in this novel are as alive as the characters Ehle creates, including another strong-willed woman who will only love a man on her terms.

First published in 1967 by Harper and reissued in 1998 by University of Tennessee Press.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book about the railroad built in the mountains where I grew up. NC author - I need to read more of his books. I will also need to visit the railroad that he wrote about. Fascinating!

[Savannah Paige Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

A true masterpiece. The complicated depictions of nature vs. human nature are impeccable. The connections between humans' exploitation of the earth and each other are still so relevant. An under appreciated classic.

[Sheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this book.

[Evan Pritchard · Rating 4 out of 5]

It didn't bowl me over like The Land Breakers, but still a dang good yarn.

[Ginny Thurston · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you love history and railroads, you will enjoy this book. I grew a bit exhausted from it after a while...