Cee says: We are on to a new series which I am calling Geometry. This week our topic will be things with straight lines. These items can be found on man made objects or in nature. Have fun and be as creative as you like.
Tag Archives: Railroad
Riding the Rails During the Great Depression
Well, I’ve been waiting for a notification from WordPress that I’ve reached my one year anniversary blogging. Oops! It never arrived. I knew it was January but didn’t remember the date. So, silly me, I went and looked and I missed it! But that’s okay. I thought what I would do is repost my very first ever blog entry. When I first started my blog, I was just going write about my family history. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the information I had was not much at all! So, I decided to branch out and started adding bits of life in general. As many things often do, I find it is branching again as I have now added my new hobby of photography. Enjoy!
In 1931, at the age of 20, my Dad and 7 of his friends left their homes in Kentucky and headed West on the rails during the Great Depression. Dad kept a little diary of the trip in a small notebook written in pencil.
Following are a few excerpts from his travel diary (written in blue italics) with some of my own comments inserted in regular text:
The date is Wednesday, April 22, 1931. It’s raining and snowing. I have a one-way ticket to Portland, Ore. We catch train No. 1 bound for Cincinnati and bid Ashland goodbye at 8:55 a.m. There are eight of us. All nice fellows to be sure. Their names are Charles E. Ball, Bennet Tussey, Sam Elsworth and myself of Ashland. Paul A. Vaughan of Ironton, O. Charles R. “Buzz” Waldron of Russell, Ky. Kenneth Ames of Catlettsburg, Ky. And Louis E. Hannon of Maysville…
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A Dash of Love
Along the smooth and slender wires, the sleepless heralds run,
Fast as the clear and living rays go streaming from the sun;
No pearls of flashes, heard or seen, their wondrous flight betray,
And yet their words are quickly caught in cities far away.
(Author Unknown)
It’s amazing how you can get an idea for a blog entry, thinking it’s going to be an easy one. Then you begin writing. Oh, my. This was supposed to be just a short little romantic entry about how my maternal grandparents met. As I started writing I started realizing how little information I really had on the subject. It could have been written in one line. One line does not a blog make!
I suppose I could fill in the blanks with some made up fun stuff or take the time to research and read about places and things related but then I would be writing fiction. My plan is to write about some of the few things I know about my family history. And that’s not supposed to be fiction.
My mother once told me that her parents met when they were both telegraphers for the railroad. That has really piqued my interest and I wanted to learn more. I had never thought of my grandmother as a working woman. I wish I still had some relatives around that could tell me the whole story.
The story I have is that it all began in a little town called Kilgore in Boyd County, Kentucky. My grandmother, Julia McNeal, was born in 1879 in Kilgore, Kentucky. My grandfather, John Chase Hatcher, was born in 1874 in Louisa, Kentucky and later moved to Kilgore.
Sometime in the 1890’s (ah, Victorian times), John went to work as the agent for the railroad station in Kilgore, Kentucky in his early 20’s. Coal was very big in Kentucky and it brought the rails through Eastern Kentucky to haul it across the country. He worked there as station agent and telegraph operator for about 20 years. The Kilgore railroad station was located about half way between Kilgore and Rush, Kentucky, both small towns being located in Boyd County (the next largest town would have been Ashland).
I had never really thought about women of the 19th century working regular jobs outside the home. They always seemed to be portrayed as stay-at-home wives and mothers. I was surprised to learn how many young women worked as telegraph operators. Why, they even operated during the Civil War. But, why not? Women have always stepped in when the men were called to fight. The work had to continue. And I kept running across references to that age-old adage that women were cheaper to hire than men because they were only going to work a short time anyway before leaving for marriage and family.
I’m surmising when I make the statement that my grandmother probably learned Morse Code and how to be a telegraph operator from her father, Andrew Creighton McNeal, since he, too, had worked as a telegraph operator. Click here for more information on Andrew Creighton McNeal. In her late teens, she went to work as a telegraph operator at the Kilgore station. I don’t know if she worked for my grandfather or with him at that time. I would hazard a guess that she worked for him as the telegraph operator while he ran the depot but, as I said, that’s a guess. But what I don’t have to guess at is that because of that telegraph, my grandparents met and fell in love. They were married in 1899 when she was 20 years old and he was 25. Of course, she added to the statistics that the young women only work a year or two before getting married!
When I decided to write about my grandparents meeting, my hope was that they had actually worked as telegraph operators at different locations and that they “met” and their love blossomed over the wire. Ah, the forerunner to internet dating! I thought that sounded much more romantic! But because they both lived in Kilgore and didn’t have automobiles, I have to go with the most logical conclusion that they met while working together.
This plate from Harper’s Weekly puts women at the center of telegraph operation. Men and women working as operators often “talked” during down time and romance ensued. Sort of like Internet dating for the 19th century. “The Telegraph,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (August 1873), 332.
As a side note, I found so much information about telegraphy in the 1800’s and women’s part in it. Most people today are unfamiliar with the telegraph, not knowing how it worked or why it was so important to a country as vast as the United States. Prior to the middle of the 1800’s the fastest way to send a message or letter was by a rider on horseback (Pony Express) or by ship. Samuel F.B. Morse’s telegraph system brought an electronic highway of dots and dashes traveling along copper wires strung on poles. The telegraph was definitely the precursor to our internet of today.
As Carolyn Marvin observed in When Old Technologies Were New, there are some surprising parallels between the experiences of nineteenth century women telegraphers and the twentieth-century story of women in the field of computer programming. Some of these similarities are technically based; the telegrapher’s work, like that of a modern computer programmer, consisted of translating English-language instructions into machine-readable codes. Morse Code is, in fact, a direct ancestor of the ASCII codes used by software programmers. The computer itself is the direct descendant of the telegraph. In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the communications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on the telegraph’s original work.
Riding the Rails During the Great Depression
From Ashland, KY to Portland, OR – 1931
In 1931, at the age of 20, my Dad and 7 of his friends left their homes in Kentucky and headed West on the rails during the Great Depression. Dad kept a little diary of the trip in a small notebook written in pencil.
Following are a few excerpts from his travel diary (written in blue italics) with some of my own comments inserted in regular text:
The date is Wednesday, April 22, 1931. It’s raining and snowing. I have a one-way ticket to Portland, Ore. We catch train No. 1 bound for Cincinnati and bid Ashland goodbye at 8:55 a.m. There are eight of us. All nice fellows to be sure. Their names are Charles E. Ball, Bennet Tussey, Sam Elsworth and myself of Ashland. Paul A. Vaughan of Ironton, O. Charles R. “Buzz” Waldron of Russell, Ky. Kenneth Ames of Catlettsburg, Ky. And Louis E. Hannon of Maysville, Ky.
Wouldn’t it be just so much fun to travel across country by rail. To be able to see this country without all of the hustle and bustle of “hurry up and get there”. I just did a curiousity search on Amtrack for today’s fares from Ashland, KY to Portland, OR. Looks like for a reserved coach seat the price ranges from $326 to $440 one way. Quite a difference in cost from the 30’s………
We are stopped by a C&O agent in Cinn. who tells us that we can’t take the Big 4 train out of there on the ticket. We slip around and ask the Conductor of the Big 4 and he says it’s all right so that saves us 24 hours delay but loses $150.00 for the C&O. We leave Cinn. at 1:00 p.m. and arrive in Chicago at 7:45 p.m.
Chicago in the 30’s! My, but that conjures up a lot of images. Of course, all my images are from history books and old movies. I think of Jimmy Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart. Dad’s next entry just made me laugh. Although if I landed in Chicago in the 30’s, I probably would have done the exact same thing………
After eating a big supper we try to find Al Capone’s name in the telephone book but don’t have any luck though.
A penny? Just a penny? Sheesh, the government now wants to eliminate them altogether………
A few minutes later a drunk wants to borrow a penny from us. It isn’t long till he is kicked out by the cop in the Depot.
Well, we’re on the Portland Rose at last. It leaves at 10:15 just 2 ½ hours after we arrive. We all stretch out in the seat and prepare for a night’s rest. We can’t afford a sleeper.
We cross the Miss. River just after midnite. I wake up in Ames, Iowa Thursday morning just at daylight. The next town of any importance was Omaha, Neb. We arrived there at 9:45 a.m.
We only have 20 minutes to find a restaurant. We don’t have any too much time either for the train is ready to go when we get back. It’s snowing pretty hard but it isn’t sticking. 10:05 and we leave Omaha.
We pass through a town called Columbus but it isn’t in Ohio. It happens to be in Nebraska.
I’ve seen this same scene in some of the old black and white movies I watch. I can picture it all so easily………
Well, the big time is now starting, all 8 of us are in the smoker. Buzz is playing a French harp and we are all singing. We’re getting a big hand from the passengers out in the coach.
We pass on through North Platte, Julesburg, Sidney and Cheyenne at 8:25. It seems that we went into Colorado at Julesburg and right back out again. Everything is white with snow and we can see plenty of jackrabbits and pheasants.
We travel on through Laramie, Rawling and Green River but it isn’t a drink. I had to consult my timetable cause I was asleep. At 6:00 we’re just coming into Kemmerer. We leave Wyoming and enter Idaho at Pegram. We don’t stop though. The train stops 5 minutes at Montpelier and 10 minutes at Pocatello. We stop a minute at Boise, the capital of Idaho, and I get a snapshot of the Depot and the mountains. We get another picture at Nampa.
I’ve never been to the Pacific Northwest. I’m sure it was magnificent then because it’s still beautiful now………
We got into Oregon in Nyssa and right back out again. We’re on the Snake River. We stop at Huntington, Oregon and change our watch for the 2nd time since we left home. We pass through the Columbia River Gorge and follow the river on into Portland. It sure was beautiful. We passed waterfalls, one that fell 600 feet. Cliffs that rise 500 and 600 feet straight into the air. Every once in a while I can see the highway about halfway up the mountain. It is just too beautiful for words. We arrived in Portland at 7:45 Saturday morning.
Seems to be the cry of the times………
One of the boys made a wise one. He said that we couldn’t get lost because we wasn’t goin anyplace.
So there is the first part of the trip. I remember a train ride I had as a child in the 50’s. That’s another story for another time!
Statistics indicate that during the Great Depression approximately 250,000 teenagers (out of about four million jobless) were riding the rails.
In 1932, Southern Pacific agents ejected 683,457 trespassers from the company’s trains. The price of trespassing on the rails was high: The Interstate Commerce Commission recorded 5,962 trespassers killed and injured in the first 10 months of 1932. See PBS.ORG for more information on Riding the Rails during The Great Depression.
LIVING WITH MY ANCESTORS 