The Southern Railway
The Southern Railway

Author: Sallie Loy

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9780738516417

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The Southern Railway was the pinnacle of rail service in the South for nearly 100 years. Its roots stretch back to 1827, when the South Carolina Canal & Rail Road Company was founded in Charleston to provide freight transportation and America's first regularly scheduled passenger service. Through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Great Depression, rail lines throughout the South continued to merge, connecting Washington, D.C. to Atlanta and Charleston to Memphis. The Southern Railway was born in 1893 at the height of these mergers. It came to an end in 1982, merging with Norfolk and Western Railway to become Norfolk Southern Railway. The history of the railway lives on, however, and Norfolk Southern continues to "serve the South." In 2003, the Southern Railway Historical Association selected the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History as the repository for their extensive archives. Included in this collection are hundreds of professional quality, black-and-white photographs taken by company photographers throughout the railway's history. These photographs not only capture the transition from steam to diesel and the pinnacle of rail travel, but also the development of the South through much of the 20th century. While a few of these images have been seen by the public, the vast majority have not.

Iron Confederacies
Iron Confederacies

Author: Scott Reynolds Nelson

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-10-12

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 0807876100

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During Reconstruction, an alliance of southern planters and northern capitalists rebuilt the southern railway system using remnants of the Confederate railroads that had been built and destroyed during the Civil War. In the process of linking Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia by rail, this alliance created one of the largest corporations in the world, engendered bitter political struggles, and transformed the South in lasting ways, says Scott Nelson. Iron Confederacies uses the history of southern railways to explore linkages among the themes of states' rights, racial violence, labor strife, and big business in the nineteenth-century South. By 1868, Ku Klux Klan leaders had begun mobilizing white resentment against rapid economic change by asserting that railroad consolidation led to political corruption and black economic success. As Nelson notes, some of the Klan's most violent activity was concentrated along the Richmond-Atlanta rail corridor. But conflicts over railroads were eventually resolved, he argues, in agreements between northern railroad barons and Klan leaders that allowed white terrorism against black voters while surrendering states' control over the southern economy.