HUNTINGTON — Mid-Atlantic Publishing, an imprint of the Huntington-based Publishers Place, has just released a new work  of historical fiction set in the Mountain State.

 “Witness at Hawks Nest, by Milton native Dwight Harshbarger, is a compelling work of historical fiction set in 1930s, West Virginia depicting the worst industrial disaster in America's history. Twenty-five cents-an-hour jobs attracted thousands of men, two-thirds of them black, to dig and drill Union Carbide's Hawks Nest (WV) tunnel. At least 800, possibly over 1,500, workers died of acute silicosis poisoning.

The story follows Orville Orr, a company-paid deputy hired by his old army buddy, Bullhead McCloud, to roust workers from their shacks. Orville secures the first autopsy of a tunnel worker and builds evidence of the company's responsibility for the deaths. Armen, the mixed-race daughter of a tunnel worker who has died of silicosis, joins him and they fall in love as Orville risks his life to expose the truth. 

The first book about this tragedy, “Hawk's Nest” by West Virginia native Hubert Skidmore, was published by Doubleday Doran in 1941. Within one year, all copies of this book had disappeared from circulation.

Dwight Harshbarger, a native of Milton, is currently Adjunct Professor of Community Medicine, West Virginia University Medical School. He served as Executive Director of Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies (Massachusetts) and as senior vice president for Reebok International, Ltd., and vice president of Sealy, Inc. He earned both an AB and an MA in psychology at West Virginia University, completing his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of North Dakota.  He published his first work of fiction, In the Heart of the Hills: A Novel in Stories, in 2005.

"Witness at Hawks Nest is a welcome addition to literature about that horrific incident. Harshbarger gives faces and voices to the victims-the men who dug the Hawks Nest tunnel and fell victim to one of the worst industrial  disasters in the nation, and the families who loved them,” said Denise Giardina, author of “Storming Heaven” and “The Unquiet Earth.”

Other praise includes Joseph Wyatt, Professor of Psychology, Marshall University and author of “The Millennium Man.” He wrote,

"Dwight Harshbarger captures the destruction during the digging of Hawks Nest tunnel of well over 700 lives-workers who fell victim to undiagnosed silicosis and the cover-up of the tragedy by Union Carbide. I wish all West Virginia citizens would read this important book."

 

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