In this 2006 photograph, Helen Nichols Dale is holding the photograph seen in the previous post of her father and her, taken more than 60 years previously.
Helen Nichols was 11 when the Church Hill tunnel collapsed on Oct. 2, 1925.
Dark-haired, pretty, a little shy and with always curious brown eyes, Helen lived in the 18-hundred block of Carrington Street on Union Hill, a neighborhood that sat on a bluff over the Shockoe Valley looking toward downtown Richmond. Named for the coming-together of the 13 original colonies, Union Hill was a blue-collar neighborhood, laid out in 1805 and populated with one- and two-story frame or brick houses. Carrington was paved with cobblestones.
There was one important reason Helen liked the two-story brick house where she lived with her mother, father, three sisters and one brother: It had indoor plumbing. Helen had never lived in a house with indoor plumbing.
Her parents, Horace Thomas Nichols and Lou Ella Williams Nichols, had worked their way to Richmond from far Southwest Virginia, where they were born. Horace's parents were tobacco farmers. When he was 20, in 1906, he married Lou Ella. She was 14 years old.
Horace got a job with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company. As he grew more experienced, the company moved him east. That's what brought him and his family to Union Hill in 1923.
Helen had never lived in a place as large as Richmond. Instead of having to walk down a dirt road to the country store to use a telephone, here she could go to a neighbor's house. Instead of hauling corn to the mill, the family could buy packaged cornmeal at the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, a chain grocery store on nearby Venable Street.
The fact that people in Richmond lived so close together meant Helen had more friends than ever before. There were at least 15 other children on her block alone. Helen's best friend, Irma Giovanetti, lived a few doors down. Another friend, Margaret Garbett, lived right across the street. They all went to Fairmount School together at 21st and T streets. Helen did well in school. She loved to read.
Helen thought the city was noisy. Nobody on Carrington Street owned a car. They rode the streetcars that clanged through Richmond's neighborhoods. Horse-drawn wagons clopped and rumbled over Union Hill's rough cobblestones. The milkman brought fresh dairy products, butter and eggs at dawn. Later, the iceman's wagon came by with 25- and 50-pound blocks. Another vendor sold bread, rolls and pastries from his cart. Still another sold fresh vegetables in season.
All the neighbors knew each other, and on warm evenings they'd gather on their wide front porches and talk until dark. Helen recalls the Reams sisters in particular. She'd go to their house down the block every week or so and thread "oodles" of needles for them, some with white thread and some with black. The two elderly sisters could still sew enough to mend, but they could no longer see well enough to thread a needle.
Helen remembered life on Union Hill in 1925 as much harder than life 80 years later. She recalled her mother baking pies, cakes and biscuits in a wood-fired stove. To test the oven temperature, Lou Ella would stick her hand in it. Helen's mother also canned fresh fruits, vegetables and meats in a hot, airless kitchen in late summer. In the winter, a fireplace in each room provided warmth, but the parts of the house that weren't being used were left cold.
There was no electricity. But the house had gas lights, much better than the reeking kerosene lamps they'd used in the country. And the family had a wind-up Victrola. Helen's father liked to listen to hymns.
At around 3:30 on Friday afternoon, Oct. 2, 1925, the temperature was in the upper 60s according to the Weather Bureau in Chimborazo Park on the far side of Church Hill. The bureau recorded more than an inch of rain that day, but afternoon skies were fair.
* * *
It was clear that something had happened. Neighbors called to each other. Radio hadn't come to Richmond yet, but word spread fast. Within seconds, it seemed, everybody from one end of Union Hill to the other knew what had happened.
The train tunnel under Jefferson Hill had collapsed. And people were trapped.
Helen and the other neighborhood children ran from Carrington Street across Venable Street and two blocks more to Jefferson Hill. Soon, the crowd numbered several hundred.
"We ran right up to the edge of the park and looked down. All we could see were the workers outside. The train was in the tunnel underneath us. We were way up on the hill," she remembered. That put them about 80 feet above the frantic activity at the tunnel's west entrance.
"I suppose they were trying to figure out some way to get in there. We had to stay up on the hill. They wouldn't let anybody down there."
Helen knew that her father was a section foreman for the C&O, what the family always called "the railroad." But it never occurred to her that he might have been on this C&O train, in this C&O tunnel, that Friday afternoon.
He was.
"I just never thought of that," she said. "It didn't seem important. We were too young to take anything seriously. We went to the park to see what all the excitement was, like children do.
"That's where my memory stops. I was so young, and it was so long ago ... I just didn't think to be worried about Daddy."
News was hard to come by at the top of the hill, and eventually Helen got tired of watching and went home for supper, still not knowing that her father had been part of the work crew on the train.
But he hadn't been trapped in the cave-in. He escaped by the narrowest of margins.
Horace Nichols walked out of the tunnel a scant few minutes before the cave-in. He came out to fetch a tool -- just before a few bricks dropped from the tunnel's ceiling, breaking electrical connections as they fell and plunging the tunnel into darkness. Workmen felt a rush of air, and the roof caved in. Engineer Thomas J. Mason died in his locomotive. (His body was recovered eight days later.) Fireman Benjamin F. Mosby died later that night. Some of the 200 or so day laborers, mostly African Americans, escaped death by crawling under the flatcars.
Helen didn't recall whether her father came home for that evening's supper around the trestle table in the kitchen on Carrington Street, but she doubts it. "I know he spent a long time working to dig people out." The rescue efforts continued until Oct. 10.
"It was later when we found out that Daddy was working in there just before it collapsed and walked out in the nick of time. We were way up on the top of the hill that afternoon. I wouldn't have recognized my daddy from that far up even if I had known he was down there.
"It was just something that happened."
* * *
Church Hill remained a part of the Nichols family for two more generations. Helen married a weekly newspaperman's son from rural Georgia, Jimmie Dale, in 1941 and had a son nine months after Pearl Harbor and a daughter right after the war ended. After the war, the Dales bought a house about eight blocks from Carrington Street. Their two children attended the same school Helen had attended, where they were taught by a few of the same teachers. (The school, built about 1895, is still standing and now serves as housing for the elderly and handicapped.)
Helen's oldest sister, Annie, married Bick Corker, a boy who lived on Carrington Street.
Joe, Helen's only brother, joined the Army in the late 1930s and was stationed on Corregidor Island in the Philippines when World War II broke out. He was captured by the Japanese. He weighed 85 pounds when he came home.
Horace Nichols died in 1952, and Lou Ella died in 1985. Helen was the last of the five Nichols children to die.
The story of Horace Nichols' narrow escape from the Church Hill tunnel has been told by four generations of Horace's descendants - not always in detail but always with a sense of awe.
Helen Nichols Dale was my mother. In her last year of life, I discovered that she was a good interview. Her memory was excellent. And she was honest enough to own up to it when the details escaped her. At age 92, she could say "I don't remember" without a trace of embarrassment.
Although I had heard the story of Grampa and the tunnel all of my life, I interviewed my mother over the course of three weeks that summer in 2006 and then confirmed what I could of her memories. The details she recalled 81 years later were impressive. She remembered childhood friends she hadn't seen in 75 years - and how to spell their names correctly. Everything that I could find on the record about the disaster was consistent with the family story.
The final question I asked her involved the effort to recover the locomotive. Did she think it was possible?
She responded with an answer rooted in a lifetime of practicality: "I don't know why they think they can do it now when they couldn't do it 81 years ago. That doesn't make any sense at all."
The effort in 2006 to recover the locomotive was suspended after city engineers raised concern about the hill's stability. Historians believe three men died, and they suspect one body is still inside.
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