"Wreck of the Old 97" -- Veron Delhart
“Wreck of the Old 97” -- Johnny Cash
Despite having the requisite need and backing, the effort to construct a transcontinental stalled, the result of southern opposition. The middle 19th-Century American South was besieged with threats to its traditional lifestyle. Thanks to the advantages in the Electoral College and Congressional representation by the infamous Three-Fifths Clause, conservative Democrats had dominated our nation’s politics since the election of 1800. But by mid-century, demographics had begun to shift the political center of power increasingly northward. Free Soilers, industrialists, liberals, internationalists, and, most hated of all, abolitionists were finding their own voices, all opposed to Southern interests which could be summed up in a single word: Slavery.
Hostility to the federal government had existed since the Constitution Ratification Debates of 1787-88. The Constitution endowed the federal government with vastly expanded powers at the expense of the states, and citizens were naturally concerned on the use to which these massive powers would be employed. Opposition to the new Constitution among Southern planters was rooted in the fear that a strong federal government might destroy the South’s replunant attachment to the Peculiar Institution. Patrick Henry, urging his fellow Virginians to reject the new Constitution, issued a warning that resonated with slave-holders across the South: “They’ll free your niggers.”
In the fateful election of 1860, the Democratic Party’s worse fears were realized. The fierce debate over the degree of protection accorded slavery in the vast unincorporated territories to in the West fractured the party, into three sectional factions, each of which nominated its own favored candidate for president. Facing these three claimants to Democratic leadership was the inhumanly tall and lanky Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, a dark horse candidate of the new Republican Party, an unlikely coalition of former Whigs, abolitionists, anti-slavery Democrats, Free Soilers, Know Nothings, and various others. Lincoln’s owned his unexpected nomination to his being the only well known Republican whose views on slavery had not fatally piqued one or more party cliques: In short, he was the only candidate acceptable to all party blocs.
Lincoln proved far more capable and cunning than either his Democratic opponents or Republican rivals ever imagined. He instinctively understood that the key to Republican unity lay in the one issue that brought these feuding factions together initially. In 1860, Lincoln and the Republican Party campaigned on the promise of not allowing slavery to extend to the unincorporated western lands to the exclusion of all else. With the Democratic vote divided between three candidates, Lincoln’s nearly 40% of the popular vote proved a plurality sufficient to will a majority of electoral votes. Seeing in Lincoln the very nemesis they had always feared, Democratic planters stampeded the Southern states into secession, an ill-conceived undertaking that doomed the very institution they hoped to protect.
But the destruction of slavery is another story. This one is about a train crash.
Free of Southern Democratic obstructionism, the new Republican congress was free to exercise the muscles of the federal government on a unprecedented scale. There programs included the railroad giveaway program I mentioned in the first paragraph of this long, disjointed exposition. To be sure, while the South had been opposed to a national railroad on principle, they did offer a “fair” compromise in agreeing to support a line skirting along the Mexican border with a terminus in the Deep South. But with Republicans in the White House and no Southern obstructionists in Congress, a more reasonable route was approved. The Pacific Railroads Acts of 1962, 1863, 1864, 1865, and 1866 were successively signed into law. The long tradition of federate giveaways to corporate enterprise began, here in the form of land grants. In the past, Congress had supported corporations, but not directly. Instead, they would give land to the states for use to galvanize financial undertaking as they saw fit, but such an approach was not feasible in the case of a national railroad for any number of reasons, the primary being that any interstate enterprise of this magnitude required unified planning and direction. Furthermore, state legislatures were even more corrupt then than now, and funds intended for public benefit too often found their ways into the pockets of state legislators and their cronies.
The Golden Spike was immediately replaced with one of more mundane manufacture of course, but the magnificence of the event remained unvanquished for that. Before completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, the trek from East Coast to West typically required a dangerous, grinding odyssey of six or more months. Now the entire transit could be accomplished in a single week of relative comfort.
The new system of mail delivery was a boon to small towns through which trains would cross without stopping. As the train approached an ingenious apparatus hold bagged mail for other destinations, a mail clerk would kick a bag of mail intended for that town from the train while extending a boom to snatch to proffered suspended sack for delivery further down the line. The process could be dangerous. More than a few careless clerks paid with their lives making the risky exchange. The occasional lack of caution was even more fatal to many an unfortunate sack of mail which found its way beneath the wheels of the train, creating an explosion of mail clerks came to call “snowstorms.”
Hostility to the federal government had existed since the Constitution Ratification Debates of 1787-88. The Constitution endowed the federal government with vastly expanded powers at the expense of the states, and citizens were naturally concerned on the use to which these massive powers would be employed. Opposition to the new Constitution among Southern planters was rooted in the fear that a strong federal government might destroy the South’s replunant attachment to the Peculiar Institution. Patrick Henry, urging his fellow Virginians to reject the new Constitution, issued a warning that resonated with slave-holders across the South: “They’ll free your niggers.”
In the fateful election of 1860, the Democratic Party’s worse fears were realized. The fierce debate over the degree of protection accorded slavery in the vast unincorporated territories to in the West fractured the party, into three sectional factions, each of which nominated its own favored candidate for president. Facing these three claimants to Democratic leadership was the inhumanly tall and lanky Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, a dark horse candidate of the new Republican Party, an unlikely coalition of former Whigs, abolitionists, anti-slavery Democrats, Free Soilers, Know Nothings, and various others. Lincoln’s owned his unexpected nomination to his being the only well known Republican whose views on slavery had not fatally piqued one or more party cliques: In short, he was the only candidate acceptable to all party blocs.
Lincoln proved far more capable and cunning than either his Democratic opponents or Republican rivals ever imagined. He instinctively understood that the key to Republican unity lay in the one issue that brought these feuding factions together initially. In 1860, Lincoln and the Republican Party campaigned on the promise of not allowing slavery to extend to the unincorporated western lands to the exclusion of all else. With the Democratic vote divided between three candidates, Lincoln’s nearly 40% of the popular vote proved a plurality sufficient to will a majority of electoral votes. Seeing in Lincoln the very nemesis they had always feared, Democratic planters stampeded the Southern states into secession, an ill-conceived undertaking that doomed the very institution they hoped to protect.
But the destruction of slavery is another story. This one is about a train crash.
Free of Southern Democratic obstructionism, the new Republican congress was free to exercise the muscles of the federal government on a unprecedented scale. There programs included the railroad giveaway program I mentioned in the first paragraph of this long, disjointed exposition. To be sure, while the South had been opposed to a national railroad on principle, they did offer a “fair” compromise in agreeing to support a line skirting along the Mexican border with a terminus in the Deep South. But with Republicans in the White House and no Southern obstructionists in Congress, a more reasonable route was approved. The Pacific Railroads Acts of 1962, 1863, 1864, 1865, and 1866 were successively signed into law. The long tradition of federate giveaways to corporate enterprise began, here in the form of land grants. In the past, Congress had supported corporations, but not directly. Instead, they would give land to the states for use to galvanize financial undertaking as they saw fit, but such an approach was not feasible in the case of a national railroad for any number of reasons, the primary being that any interstate enterprise of this magnitude required unified planning and direction. Furthermore, state legislatures were even more corrupt then than now, and funds intended for public benefit too often found their ways into the pockets of state legislators and their cronies.
The Golden Spike was immediately replaced with one of more mundane manufacture of course, but the magnificence of the event remained unvanquished for that. Before completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, the trek from East Coast to West typically required a dangerous, grinding odyssey of six or more months. Now the entire transit could be accomplished in a single week of relative comfort.
The new system of mail delivery was a boon to small towns through which trains would cross without stopping. As the train approached an ingenious apparatus hold bagged mail for other destinations, a mail clerk would kick a bag of mail intended for that town from the train while extending a boom to snatch to proffered suspended sack for delivery further down the line. The process could be dangerous. More than a few careless clerks paid with their lives making the risky exchange. The occasional lack of caution was even more fatal to many an unfortunate sack of mail which found its way beneath the wheels of the train, creating an explosion of mail clerks came to call “snowstorms.”
In the mid-19th Century, the American government began plans for transcontinental rail service, a project that would eventually lead to the Union Pacific Railroad, Western Pacific Railroad, and the Central Pacific Railroad become beneficiaries of perhaps the most generous federal give-away programs in American history, courtesy of the Pacific Railroad Acts. The federal goal was to promote the building of telegraph and rail lines from the Missouri River to the Pacific Coast, hastening the government's ability to communicate almost instantly across the vast continent as well as moving mail, troops, and sundry other cargo so rapidly as to be unimaginable to any previous generation.
When the Southern states abandoned the Union, they took with them the constraints they had imposed on the federal government over the six previous decades, and the new robust Republican Congress was eager to flex its newfound powers. The South forsake the Union in response to Northern opposition to slavery in western lands. But now outside the Union they could not prevent Lincoln and the new Congress from setting aside the very land on which Democratic planters once hoped to establish vast slave-worked estates as future low-priced homesteads. The first Republican president and congress pledged federal support in establishing land-grant agricultural colleges in every single state. They ensured the security of the United States economy during an expensive and protracted Civil War by establishing a system of national banks.
A direct grant of federal lands to railroads was deemed preferable, and a most generous gift it proved to be. By 1970, over one-tenth of the United States, an area totaling in size more acreage than the state of Texas, had been given by the federal government to railroad companies. The bulk of this land was sold to settlers, ranchers, and businesses to raise capital for railroad construction.
First and Last Pages of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862,
Signed by President Lincoln on 1 July 1862
The most famous moment in American railroad history occurred on 10 May 1969 in Box Elder County, Utah atop a rise known as Promontory Summit. It was here that, after six months of backbreaking labor by mainly Chinese workers augmented by work crews comprised of Civil War veterans, African-Americans, and Mormons, tracks from the West met those originating in the East. Two famous locomotives -- the Union Pacific No. 119 and the Central Pacific No. 60 -- stood nose-to-nose with but one single crosstie remaining to be affixed between them. Former California governor and future US senator, eventual founder of Stanford University, but on that day the president of Southern Pacific Railroad, Leland Stanford hefted a spike maul made from silver to gently tap in place the “Final Spike,” now better remembered as the “Golden Spike” for the metal of its composition.
Promontory Summit, 10 May 1969
In 1850, the US had about 9,000 miles of track. Steamboats, canal barges, and turnpikes still surpassed rail as the primary means of transporting freight and mail. By 1871, railroad mileage had increased to 45,000, and rail had replaced its slower rivals as the primary means of transport. By the turn of the century, 215,000 miles of track crisscrossed the American nation.
As previously noted, one of the primary justifications for federal subsidies in the expansion of rail service was the bettering of mail delivery. To say rail met the hopes and expectations of those legislators who drafted and passed the five successive Pacific Railroad Acts would be a gross understatement. Trains had been delivering US mail as early as 1832, but the practice grew only slowly until 1862 when the Postal Service experimented with sorting mail in route to destinations. Seeing the potential, Congress created the American Railway Mail Service. Specially designated postal cars were attracted to a limited number of passenger service trains for the first time in 1864. Within these cars, postal clerks sorted and postmarked mail even as they sped to their destination. By 1880 mail cars were attached to most passenger service lines. Devoted mail trains also appeared, these traveling at greater speeds and having rail priority over other trains
Clerks Sorting Mail Within
a Railway Mail Service Car
The new system of mail delivery was a boon to small towns through which trains would cross without stopping. As the train approached an ingenious apparatus, a "mail crane," suspended bagged correspondence and packages marked for more distant destinations, a mail clerk would kick a bag of mail intended for that town from the train while extending a boom to snatch to the proffered bag. The process could be dangerous. More than a few careless clerks paid with their lives making the risky exchange. The occasional lack of caution was even more fatal to many an unfortunate sack of mail which found its way beneath the wheels of the train, creating an explosion of envelopes and shredded letters the clerks came to call “snowstorms.”
Moving Mail Train Exchanging Mail
But exchanging mail from moving trains was not the only hazard confronting railroad mail clerks: Derailments was not infrequent before our own era. Consider, for example, the history of the Southern Railway’s Fast Mail 97, a dedicated postal and newspaper train connecting Washington D.C. and Atlanta, Georgia, popularly known as the Old 97 a short but speedy train consisting of a locomotive, tender, two postal cars, a baggage car, and a single express car. The Fast Mail 97 had to be fast. It’s contract required it to maintain a tight schedule, and painful financial penalty was attached for each minute the mail arrived late.
1903 was a hard year for the Old 97. The Fast Mail had a reputation for reliability and punctuality which both crew and railroad worked to justify. Their diligence would cost them dearly that year. On 13 April, racing southward toward its Atlanta terminus, the hurdling train struck a huge stone laying atop the tracks and derailed just north of Lexington, North Carolina. Both the engineer and one fireman were killed in the crash.
1903 was a hard year for the Old 97. The Fast Mail had a reputation for reliability and punctuality which both crew and railroad worked to justify. Their diligence would cost them dearly that year. On 13 April, racing southward toward its Atlanta terminus, the hurdling train struck a huge stone laying atop the tracks and derailed just north of Lexington, North Carolina. Both the engineer and one fireman were killed in the crash.
From the New York Times, 14 April 1903
Sadly, this tragedy would not be the only fell misfortune to befall the Fast Mail in the annus horribilis of 1903: Yet to come was the crash that would make the Old 97 famous for all time.
On 27 April 1903, already over an hour behind schedule, the Old 97 pulled out of Washington D.C. for parts south pulled by Locomotive No. 1102, a powerful ten-wheeled behemoth barely one month old. Still running one hour behind when the Fast Mail pulled into Monroe, Virginia, the exhausted crew was relieved.
Joseph (“Steve”) Broady, an experienced 33-year-old engineer known for his skill and expertise, was behind the controls of Locomotive No. 1102, as departed Monroe to complete the next leg of the route. While no definitive evidence exists, Broady’s superiors in Monroe almost certainly instructed him to increase speed sufficiently to get the Old 97 into Spencer, North Carolina on time. it In addition to his reputation as a competent engineer, Broady was known as something of a risk-taker. The nickname "Steve" was awarded him by co-workers who compared him to the famous daredevil Steve Broady, the first individual according to perhaps apocryphal accounts to survive leaping from the Brooklyn Bridge. Pressure from superiors to make up the lost time and Broady's willingness to take risks would prove fatal in combination.
The 166-mile leg from Monroe to Spencer was normally a four-hour, 15-minute run with an average speed of 39 miles-per-hour. If he hoped to arrive in Spencer in time, Broady would have to average 51 miles-per-hour. The Monroe-Spencer run, characterized by narrow curves and shifting grades, was not conductive to the high speeds. Still, Broady’s daredevil personality and trust in his own abilities urged him to accept the risk.
Broady’s luck fatally failed as he descended the steep three-mile grade leading to the Stillhouse Trestle just outside Danville Virginia at a speed approximating 60 miles-per-hour. As the crash cost the lives of Broady, the conductor, the flagman, and both firemen, we can never be sure why Broady did not apply the brakes before rounding the curve leading onto the trestle. The most likely explanation suggests Broady planned to employ a common technique used by engineers of that era. They would often approach turns at high speeds, apply brakes while entering the curve, and then accelerate as they pulled out. In all likelihood, Broady pulled the brakes at the appropriate time only to learn the braking system lacked sufficient air pressure. At any rate, we know Broady desperately and hopelessly attempted to throw the engine into reverse, thereby locking the wheels. Realizing both he and his train were doomed, the engineer warned those who might be in the path of destruction of the approaching danger with the screams of the train's whistle. Entering the curve at an impossible speed, the Old 97 bucked the tracks and fell into the 45-feet deep ravine below the Stillhouse Trestle.
On the 18 men aboard the Fast Mail, 11 died instantly or shortly thereafter from injuries sustained in the crash. The seven survivors, including three postal workers, had leaped from the train before its deadly plunge into the ravine. Also among the survivors were hundreds of colorful canaries, escapees from the baggage car. These fortunate birds were still flying amongst the wreckage and ruin to greet arriving rescue workers and curious spectators with chirps and song.
Joseph Andrew "Steve" Broady (1870-1903)
The 166-mile leg from Monroe to Spencer was normally a four-hour, 15-minute run with an average speed of 39 miles-per-hour. If he hoped to arrive in Spencer in time, Broady would have to average 51 miles-per-hour. The Monroe-Spencer run, characterized by narrow curves and shifting grades, was not conductive to the high speeds. Still, Broady’s daredevil personality and trust in his own abilities urged him to accept the risk.
Broady’s luck fatally failed as he descended the steep three-mile grade leading to the Stillhouse Trestle just outside Danville Virginia at a speed approximating 60 miles-per-hour. As the crash cost the lives of Broady, the conductor, the flagman, and both firemen, we can never be sure why Broady did not apply the brakes before rounding the curve leading onto the trestle. The most likely explanation suggests Broady planned to employ a common technique used by engineers of that era. They would often approach turns at high speeds, apply brakes while entering the curve, and then accelerate as they pulled out. In all likelihood, Broady pulled the brakes at the appropriate time only to learn the braking system lacked sufficient air pressure. At any rate, we know Broady desperately and hopelessly attempted to throw the engine into reverse, thereby locking the wheels. Realizing both he and his train were doomed, the engineer warned those who might be in the path of destruction of the approaching danger with the screams of the train's whistle. Entering the curve at an impossible speed, the Old 97 bucked the tracks and fell into the 45-feet deep ravine below the Stillhouse Trestle.
On the 18 men aboard the Fast Mail, 11 died instantly or shortly thereafter from injuries sustained in the crash. The seven survivors, including three postal workers, had leaped from the train before its deadly plunge into the ravine. Also among the survivors were hundreds of colorful canaries, escapees from the baggage car. These fortunate birds were still flying amongst the wreckage and ruin to greet arriving rescue workers and curious spectators with chirps and song.
The Wreckage of the Old 97 in an Undated Photograph
Taken Some Days After the Crash
Southern Railroad, eager to escape any liability, placed all blame entirely on the shoulders of Broady the day following the wreck. A company vice-president denied any suggestion that the engineer had been encouraged to make up lost time and exaggerated the speed at which the Fast Mail descended the deadly grade leading into Danville. The families of the killed men would each receive $10-thousand in compensation from the railroad company -- well, except for Broady's family. His family received nothing. The classic folksong, “The Wreck of the Old 97,” set to the tune of “The Ship That Never Returned,” a popular song from 1865, appeared shortly after the crash. This song would prove far more historically significant if far less tragic than did the wreck which inspired it.
In 1924, Vernon Dalhart, whose eclectic musical career ranged from Broadway to opera to classical to dance, recorded “The Wreck of the Old 97” for Victor Talking Machine Company would be the first American country song to sell over one-million copies. Eventually sells would exceed five million. Its success alerted recording companies to the existence of a sizable and untapped market for this unexplored genre. Dalhart made country music mainstream.
Dalhart’s success had consequences of its own. “The Wreck of the Old 97 was now a commercial success and a valuable property. But its authorship was uncertain. Fred Jackson Lewey, cousin to one of unfortunate firemen aboard the Old 97, claimed he and co-author Charles Noell composed the lyrics the day following the crash. One of the first individuals to reach the wreckage after the crash was local resident David Graves George, a telegraph operator, railroad brakeman, and singer. He too claimed authorship. Henry Whitter who with his partner would make the first commercial recording of “The Wreck of the Old 97” almost certainly altered the lyrics.
In 1933, George sued Victor Talking Machine Company in federal court for copyright infringement. The case would percolate through the courts until 1940 when, in the first major copyright case heard by the United States Supreme Court, Victor Talking Machine Company won all rights to the song. Over the years, "The Wreck of the Old 97" has been recorded countless times by countless artists, both famous and unknown. Commonly, lyrics vary to a greater or lesser degree. My personal favorite cover is that of Johnny Cash.
As for Locomotive No. 1102, it was repaired and returned to service. It was finally retired and scrapped in July 1935.
Well they gave him his orders at Monroe, Virginia,
Said: "Steve, you're way behind time,
"This is not 38, this is Ol' 97,
"Put her into Spencer on time."
Then he turned around and said to his black, greasy fireman,
"Shovel on a little more coal.
"And when we cross that White Oak mountain,
"Watch Ol' '97 roll."
And then a telegram come from Washington station,
This is how it read:
"Oh that brave engineer that run ol 97,
"Is lyin in old Danville dead."
'Cos he was going down a grade making 90 miles an hour,
The whistle broke into a scream.
He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle,
Scalded to death by the steam.
One more time!
Oh, now all you ladies you'd better take a warning,
From this time on and learn.
Never speak hard words to your true-lovin' husband.
He may leave you and never return.
Poor Boy.
Bill Monroe does this well, also
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