Railroads of Pennsylvania

by Treese, Lorett

  The violence that plagued this part of Pennsylvania since the 1860s was certainly real. Mine owners, supervisors, and any other authority figures considered a threat were intimidated, beaten, and even murdered by unidentifiable perpetrators who seemed to come from nowhere. It was thought that the Molly Maguires would meet secretly, identify a victim, then appoint members from a distant part of the county to sneak in and execute the sentence they had summarily passed, while the obvious local suspects all made sure they had alibis for the evening.

  Sometime in 1873, Franklin B. Gowen met with Allan Pinkerton, head of a national detective agency, and arranged for an Irish native, James McParlan, to infiltrate the Molly Maguires. McParlan was able to win the trust of John Kehoe, sometimes called the “King of the Mollies,” whose day job was owner of the Hibernian House Tavern in Girardville. In 1876, Gowen took over the prosecution as counsel for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania at what were known as the Molly trials. McParlan was the star witness, but Gowen went down in history with an address to the jury that obtained a conviction. By 1879, nineteen Mollies had been hanged for murder and fourteen others were imprisoned. Controversy remains as to whether the men executed were actually responsible for the crimes for which they were convicted and whether the evidence used against them would stand up in court today.

  Gowen’s association with the Mollies made contemporaries wonder whether his apparent suicide in 1889 was really a murder in retribution for the role he had played in breaking up this organization. Since then, certain members of the pro-Molly school of historians have attributed the suicide to Gowen’s sense of guilt.

  Eli Bowen Travels

  Born in Lancaster in 1824, Eli Bowen made a name for himself in a field relatively new to America: travel and description writing, particularly in the coal regions. In 1852, his book titled The Pictorial Sketch-book of Pennsylvania, dedicated to the then president of the Reading Railroad, was published. The author intended it to be similar to the many guidebooks available to travelers in Europe, which described the attractions encountered along various routes. In his preface, Bowen explains the need for such a volume, contending that those traveling in America often returned “unable to identify one-half the towns, or mountains, or streams, or otherwise explain correctly the prominent local characteristics of the route traversed.” His description of the route for northbound trains between Philadelphia and Pottsville paints a picture of the nature of this region and the perceived importance of the railroad in the mid-nineteenth century:

  Passing the stations of Royer’s Ford and Limerick, we reach the borough of Pottstown, forty miles from Philadelphia. It is very pleasantly situated, in a rich undulating country, on the right bank of the Schuylkill. The houses, which are generally plain but comfortable, are built principally upon one broad street, lying above the railroad, and lined with numerous gardens and shade-trees. The scenery of the country is very fine, but had nothing of the boldness mingled with it which characterizes some other spots along this river. The valley here is equally as fertile as it is below, and the Manatawny creek, crossed by a romantic looking old stone bridge, and emptying into the Schuylkill, furnishes the driving-power of several extensive flour and sawmills. The Schuylkill navigation passes along the opposite side of the river….

  After leaving Pottstown, we soon enter the county of Berks—a rich and populous county, originally settled by Germans, and still more or less under the influence of its primitive characteristics. The general aspect and quality of the soil is rich, and its fertility is maintained, in the absence of scientific principles elsewhere called to aid, solely by hard labor…. It is no uncommon sight to see the father in the field plowing, with a little boy, scarcely able to walk, sitting on the horse, with a whip; while it is equally as common to see boys of fourteen guiding the plough, and turning over as pretty and graceful a furrow as could be desired….

  Reading possesses, to a very remarkable extent, all the requisites for great industrial enterprise…. But what is most important to this city, and which has given it, within the last few years, an impulse of great industrial vigor, is the coal trade, from whose beds it is distant thirty-six miles. Added to this, is its accessibility, by canal, to the Susquehanna, and by both railroad and canal to Philadelphia and Pottsville, giving it a commanding interior position, which must ultimately be used to its great and permanent benefit….

  The principal depots for making up the coal trains are at Mount Carbon, Palo Alto, Schuylkill Haven, and Port Clinton. At all of these places, there is extensive side-railway to arrange the cars in trains, as they arrive from the numerous branch roads. Sometimes upward of one hundred and fifty loaded cars are attached to a single locomotive, which, at five tons to each car, gives an aggregate tonnage of seven hundred and fifty tons! No other road in the world can do this!

  Local Chapters of the National Railway Historical Society

  The Central Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society is headquartered at a former Reading Railroad station in White Deer, where members operate a museum that is open by appointment. Outside, on a segment of railroad that the chapter owns, are parked its various pieces of equipment, including engines, cabooses, boxcars, and passenger cars. The chapter meets monthly and organizes activities of interest to its members. No one was home when we visited in 2011, but a locomotive was parked by a building that appeared to be functioning as a repair shop, and it looked as though repair work was under way.

  The Pottstown & Reading Chapter takes particular interest in the railroads that once served these two towns, as well as former connecting railroads and modern railroads operating in the area. The group sponsors bus tours for members to places of railroad interest, publishes a newsletter called the Colebrookdale Local, and maintains and operates a model railroad.

  Railroad station and rolling stock at White Deer, home of the Central Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society.

  The Region’s Railroad Giants

  Moncure Robinson (1802–91)

  This master engineer, born in Richmond, graduated from the College of William & Mary at the age of sixteen. A visit to the Erie Canal, employment on the James River Canal in Virginia, and study of the public works of Europe firmly convinced him that railroads would prove superior to canals. On his return to the United States, he worked on some coal feeder lines and made surveys for the Allegheny Portage Railroad. A brief history of the Danville & Pottsville Rail Road published in Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania in 1835, when hopes were still high for this project, says of Robinson, “The friends of the rail road owe much to their Chief Engineer, and they are not insensible to their obligations. Even the boys of Sunbury, at one of the illuminations for some success in the road, raised a bonfire in his honor, aloft upon an eminence, and in shouts of joy around it, called it Moncure Robinson. The road owes much of its success to his judicious selection of his engineer corps.”

  Robinson’s work for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was his crowning achievement and made him the world’s foremost civil engineer. In the winding and narrow valley of the Schuylkill River, Robinson formulated the fundamental rules for determining grades and curvatures. So great was Robinson’s reputation that in 1840, the tsar of Russia tried to hire him to design and build the new railroad system for the Russian Empire. Robinson declined and went on to establish the Bay Line, a line of steamboats running between Baltimore and Norfolk. In his history of the Reading system, James L. Holton writes that after 1842, there is no documentary evidence of any further connection of Robinson with the railroad he had worked so hard to establish, noting that no historian has ever sufficiently explained what appears to be an abrupt breach.

  An entry in the Dictionary of National Biography sums up what was remarkable about Robinson’s achievements: “As were other engineers of his day, with the exception of those from West Point, he was untrained in the technique of the profession. These men worked out their technique in the school of experience, and for
that reason their lives were characterized by a peculiar initiative and resourcefulness.”

  Franklin B. Gowen (1836–89)

  Those writing about the history of the Reading system have weighed in with some strong opinions on the life and work of Franklin B. Gowen, its most fascinating, though not its most successful, president. According to Jules Irwin Bogen in his book on anthracite railroads, Gowen was “forceful, courageous and daring with a personal magnetism that proved well-nigh irresistible even when his arguments were obviously preposterous, [but] his greatest weakness was an incorrigible optimism and an apparent unwillingness to conform his larger projects to the practical necessities of the moment.” James L. Holton describes him as “impatient, even bored, when details of real railroading practices came to his attention. It was corporate power and financial finagling that interested this complex man.” In his 1947 biography of Gowen, Marvin W. Schlegel notes that “in an age when business shuddered at the very thought of publicity, he gloried in it.”

  As a young man, Gowen had worked as a store clerk in Lancaster and superintendent of a furnace in Shamokin, where he grew aware of the vast potential of this coal region. He studied law and served as district attorney of Schuylkill County. In 1864, he became counsel for the Reading, and he was elected president of this railroad in 1870.

  He built a home, which he named Cresheim, on Stenton Avenue in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia where he had grown up. There was already a street that bore his father’s name, and Gowen saw that the neighborhood was provided with a railroad station built by Frank Furness, which made it all the more desirable. Although Gowen’s mansion was torn down in 1940, when his estate was subdivided, other late-nineteenth-century mansions still standing on East Gowen Avenue caused it to be named the “prettiest street in Philadelphia.”

  Gowen took an enormous risk for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad when he began buying up coal lands. His faith that the American economy could only expand in the long run resulted in his borrowing vast amounts of cash to invest in property that could not possibly be made productive for decades. In a report to stockholders, he stated that his objective was securing “a body of coal-land capable of supplying all the coal-tonnage that can possibly be transported over the road.”

  Such optimism resulted in the two bankruptcies that broke his spirit and clouded his reputation. As Schlegel explains, “When he failed in his last effort to reorganize the Reading in 1886 and surrendered to J. P. Morgan, that defeat, the first of his career, seemed to wipe out the memory of all his previous triumphs. Even though he never conceded that Morgan had beaten him, the victory-loving public looked on Gowen thereafter with the regretful gaze it reserves for an ex-champion trying to make a come-back.”

  According to contemporary newspaper accounts, on a December day in 1889, a chambermaid at Wormley’s Hotel in Washington, D.C., reported that Gowen had apparently remained locked in his room for nearly an entire day. The hotel manager stood on a chair to peer over the transom and spotted Gowen’s lifeless body beside the pistol with which he had shot himself in the head. In a 1905 work called Old Time Notes of Pennsylvania, Alexander K. McClure, who knew Gowen, wrote, “I was not greatly surprised one morning … to learn that in a moment of utter despair, with his own hand, he had sent the deadly bullet crashing into his own brain.”

  Gowen’s obituaries predicted that he would be remembered. In 1927, when his book on anthracite railroads was published, Jules Irwin Bogen eulogized, “The Reading Railroad as it stands today is much the system he made it.” Gowen’s final epitaph may well be written on a rusty sign that long stood in quiet Gowen City near Shamokin, identifying Gowen merely as a capitalist and landowner.

  John E. Wootten (1822–98)

  It was in 1876, while the Reading was in serious financial trouble and Franklin B. Gowen was desperate to save some cash, that John E. Wootten made a proposal that sounded almost too good to be true. Wootten had started his career as apprentice to Matthias Baldwin, later becoming foreman at one of the Reading’s smaller shops. He took over running the main shops in Reading at the age of forty-five. What he proposed was an engine that burned culm, the waste that piled up around the breakers in the coal region. In other words, he planned to build an engine that eliminated the cost of fuel and ran essentially for free.

  Gowen eagerly agreed, and Wootten got the Reading shops working on his plans. He designed a locomotive with a wider firebox above its driving wheels and the cab astride the boiler. By 1878, Wootten’s experimental Engine Number 412 had been built and was ready for shipment to the Paris Industrial Exhibition, where its camelback design drew criticism for its ungainly appearance. Although the camelbacks did not exactly run for free, their use of smaller pieces of coal did save a great deal of money and also cut down on smoke emitted from the locomotive, which made them popular for passenger trains. The camelback became the standard for all anthracite railroads and an icon for the Reading.

  Wootten retired from the Reading in 1886 as general manager. Perhaps it was too close an association with the controversial Franklin B. Gowen that prevented Wootten from ever having attained the title of president.

  Sampling the Region’s Railroad Scene

  Reading Railroad Artifacts in Reading

  Before the advent of railroads or even canals, Reading was already an industrial town known for its hatmaking and iron-manufacturing industries. By the 1920s, it was a leader in textiles and famous as the “Women’s Stocking Capital of the World.” Another important industry for Reading for more than a century was the construction and repair of locomotives and railroad cars for the Reading system.

  In the late 1830s, when the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad’s managers decided that their corporation would require repair shops at its northern terminus, Gus Nichols purchased an existing machine shop and reestablished it near Chestnut and Seventh Streets, where the company’s trains ran through the town at grade level. The shops grew to occupy the west side of Seventh Street between Franklin and Chestnut Streets, and the job opportunities created by the Reading shops caused the population of the town to triple by midcentury.

  By the turn of the century, the Reading’s equipment needs made it necessary to construct a second complex. This was completed by 1903, when it became one of the largest locomotive shops of its day, locally known as the North Sixth Street Plant. As passenger business dwindled during the twentieth century, so did business at the shops, which were closed in 1991.

  The industrial city of Reading as it appeared in the Pictorial Sketch-Book of Pennsylvania. In the foreground, a train approaches the city.

  In the second half of the twentieth century, Reading’s factory outlet centers greatly contributed to the rebirth of this town after the loss of most of its major industries. In fact, the phrase “Outlet Capital of the World” was claimed as a registered trademark by the Reading and Berks County Visitors Bureau. Reading still has outlet centers in the western part of town, but it now sports a redeveloped downtown with its new Sovereign Center, which draws many people for special events.

  Motorists entering the town from any direction pass beneath numerous railroad viaducts and can hear the sound of diesel horns throughout the day and night. Norfolk Southern’s Harrisburg line runs from Philadelphia through Reading, as does its Reading line from Allentown, while Reading & Northern trains arrive from Port Clinton. At Franklin Street, at the boundary of the original shop complex, an abandoned platform and boarded-up passenger station with a cornerstone proclaiming its date of construction as 1929 now sit amid parking facilities. In 2011, the Berks Area Reading Transportation Authority reported plans to restore it as a bus station. An old brick building on nearby Chestnut Street has survived and now bears the name of the Reading Foundry & Supply Company.

  Farther north in Reading on Sixth Street, drivers pass beneath a Reading Company viaduct known as a skew bridge because it crosses the street diagonally. This brownstone bridge was erected in 1857 by construction engineer M. E.
Lyons from a design by Richard B. Osborne. Its courses of stone are laid in ellipsoidal curves, and its arches have no keystones. For years, engineering schools sent their students to study it. Because Osborne was supposed to have carved his model out of soap and the Irish stonemasons were said to have been paid in whiskey, this viaduct has also long been known as the “Soap and Whiskey Bridge.”

  Few people who drive through this part of Reading realize they’re passing an engineering triumph called a skew bridge.

  The town’s first railroad station was built in 1836 at the corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets in the midst of the railroad shop neighborhood. As passenger service grew, a new station was constructed where the Reading’s main line intersected with its Lebanon Valley and East Pennsylvania branches. This two-story brick structure about half a mile north was called the Outer Station from the time it was completed in 1874. The station stood within a triangle of railroad tracks and boarding platforms. The clock in its tower had dials facing all four cardinal directions, and its second floor housed the railroad’s local business offices. By the late nineteenth century, it served more than seventy passenger trains a day. Outside the Outer Station was a rail yard so vast that pedestrians crossed it on a suspension bridge that the locals called the Swinging Bridge.

  Near Reading’s skew bridge, there’s a drive leading to the former location of the Outer Station. The last trains left this station in 1969, and the station was destroyed by fire during the 1970s. Today a gate keeps the curious out of this area, which is now occupied by the “City of Reading Public Works,” or so a sign says.