The Western North Carolina Railroad was the first rail line to penetrate the state’s mountain region and open it for trade and tourism. But to get the railroad up and over the Blue Ridge Mountains at Old Fort required the construction of six tunnels, nine miles of looping tracks, and the backbreaking labor of about 3,000 incarcerated workers. Most of these workers were African Americans. Many were former slaves. Some had been falsely charged or given harsh sentences for petty crimes, such as vagrancy. But all of them were forced to work, unpaid, on the railroad. As many as 400 of them died during the construction project. Their bodies were buried in unmarked graves alongside the tracks still used by trains today. The story of the WNCRR and its builders is the focus of a new exhibit opening Saturday at the Mountain Gateway Museum, 24 Water Street, in Old Fort. Titled "The Price of Progress: Remembering the WNC Railroad and the People Who Built It", the exhibit is free. Its debut is timed to celebrate the unveiling of a new memorial to the forgotten railroad workers. The memorial will be dedicated during a program at 3:30 p.m. Sunday at Andrews Geyser on Mill Creek Road, about five miles west of Old Fort. Image Caption: Construction of the 1,832-foot-long Swannanoa Tunnel at Ridgecrest was one of the hardest, and last, tasks on the Western North Carolina Railroad’s Mountain Division. To meet the deadline, crews of incarcerated workers labored on the tunnel from both east and west ends. They met in the middle on March 11, 1879, with grades and centers matching exactly. Courtesy of North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.