John Henry was a steel driver who worked on the Great Bend Tunnel through Big Bend Mountain for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in 1870, likely as an African American man newly freed from enslavement and employed under Captain William R. Johnson. Accounts portray him as about six feet tall, around 200 pounds, strong, popular, and the camp’s steel-driving champion, leading his gang by singing in rhythm as they drilled holes in dangerous conditions for blasting. At the tunnel, where workers feared that a steam drill threatened their livelihood, he challenged the machine in a contest at the east portal and, by the general consensus of many accounts, outdrove it by more than five feet, driving fourteen feet to the drill’s nine, likely aided by the machine’s tendency to hang up in cracks and clog with rock dust in the red shale. Historians later gathered contradictory testimonies, but they found support for an actual event and for John Henry’s presence at the Great Bend Tunnel, even though contractor records were destroyed by fire and more than one man may have borne the name John Henry. His death remains disputed, with traditions variously saying he died after the contest, in a rock slide, of fever, in a premature blast, or survived and left, and local belief also connects Pollie Ann, said in some accounts to have been his wife, with a nearby burial place. Through work songs, ballads, and later retellings, John Henry became both a figure rooted in tunnel labor and a lasting symbol of workers’ determination against natural obstacles and labor-saving technology.