History of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad

By Maury Klein

An updated, in-depth history of the rise and fall of the L&N Railroad that serviced the southeastern United States.

After the Civil War, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad took the lead among southern railroads in developing rail systems and organizing transcontinental travel. Through two world wars, federal government control, internal crises, external dissension, the Depression, and the great Ohio River flood of 1937, the L&N Railroad remained one of the country's most efficient lines. It is a southern institution and a railroad buff's dream. When eminent railroad historian Maury Klein’s definitive History of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad was first published in 1972, it quickly became one of the most sought-after books on railroad history. This new edition both restores a hard-to-find classic to print and provides a new introduction by Klein detailing the L&N’s history in the thirty years since the book was first published.

Praise for History of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad

“A fascinating look at the L&N’s long and tumultuous history.” —Business Horizons

“Stands both as an excellent example of what business history can accomplish and as an illustration of the work that remains to be done in the field.” —H-Net Reviews

“Reading like an epic saga, albeit with a corporation as the main character, this enduring and definitive account of the L&N successfully offers a broad yet detailed survey befitting a company that at one time helped develop and mold the South while amassing great wealth.” —Journal of Appalachian Studies

“A detailed account of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad’s first century of operation. The story of the L&N is a great one, and Klein has written a definitive corporate and financial history of the railroad. Klein's vivid account of this period in the L & N’s history will be very informative to those who wonder why America’s railroads are what they are today.” —Journal of Southern History

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813146768

Maury Klein

Maury Klein is the author of many books, including The Life and Legend of Jay Gould; Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War; and Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929. He is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Rhode Island.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

The original edition of this book appeared exactly thirty years ago. In that year of 1972, Richard M. Nixon was president and made a historic visit to China. That same year he gained reelection by a landslide and five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate complex. George M. Wallace of Alabama seemed a serious threat for the Democratic nomination until he was shot by a would-be assassin and suffered partial paralysis. Two separate teams of astronauts spent record periods of time on the moon. A stone-age tribe, the Tasadays, was discovered living in caves in the Philippines. Mark Spitz captured seven gold medals at a summer Olympics blighted by the tragic deaths of eleven Israeli athletes. Hurricane Agnes devastated the East Coast, and a strike delayed the opening of the baseball season by thirteen days. The Dow Jones industrial average soared beyond one thousand for the first time ever. Life magazine ceased publication, and All in the Family dominated the television ratings.

When this book appeared that busy year, the Louisville & Nashville Railroad was still one of the major systems of the South—a proud company with a proud history, although its future as an independent road seemed uncertain. Today the central fact about the L & N is that it has ceased to exist as a corporate presence and has become the property of historians and railroad buffs. Its disappearance is hardly unique. Since the late nineteenth century, railroads have followed a consistent pattern of being absorbed by other, usually larger roads until only a handful of lines bearing their original names survive. In this respect the railroads proved a harbinger of things to come, as they did in so many other areas of American life. During the twentieth century the business landscape of America, once crowded with familiar signposts of individual, family, and corporate firms, has seen vast numbers of them swept into the vortex of merger or failure.

The pattern for railroads followed a course that has become all too familiar in modern times. Small local lines, often bearing the names of their terminuses, joined with connecting lines to form longer roads under a new name. In Darwinian fashion the newly extended line usually acquired or built additional mileage or found itself absorbed by a still larger company. Gradually this tangle of older roads and newly built mileage coalesced into a system occupying a territory well beyond that served by any of the original lines. Where once a town or local area identified with its railroad, the blanket of identity now extended over a wide region served by a still-expanding system. Town after town that had once been a proud terminus found itself a way station on a line to somewhere else.

At an even later stage, entire systems began to swallow one another, creating mega-systems, until now only a handful of giants dominate the rail landscape. Scattered about them are clusters of smaller local lines, many of them cast aside by the giant systems or resurrected from the scrap heap of past failures. Since the early twentieth century, this process of consolidation has also been one of attrition as the American rail system shrunk in size as well as in number. At its apex in 1916, a total of 1,243 rail companies of all classes owned 254,251 miles of line. By 1994 only thirteen Class I railroads remained, and the mileage owned had declined to 132,000.¹ Lost in the shuffle of this massive consolidation and contraction was any sense of local identity among most of the survivors.

The L & N’s own history exemplifies this pattern to the last detail. Born as a child of the commercial rivalry between Louisville and Nashville, the road’s original route was plotted less by engineers than by the lottery of which towns cared to contribute to the construction of the line. The main line opened in October 1859 and soon underwent the ordeal of the Civil War, from which it emerged with the road intact, the treasury full, and an alert management eager to press its advantage over the prostrate roads of the defunct Confederacy. By 1875 it had secured control of a line to Memphis and another through the rich iron and coal regions of Alabama to Montgomery. During the next decade the company built, merged, and leased its way into Mobile, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Evansville, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Pensacola, as well as the coal fields of western Kentucky.

By 1885 this rapid expansion had elevated the L & N into one of a handful of systems dominating southern railroad traffic. It also brought the management, which was headed by New York interests, to the brink of financial disaster and forced a reorganization that installed Milton H. Smith as president in 1884, an office he held until 1921. Although not a Kentuckian by birth, Smith returned the management of the road from New York to Louisville and presided over the last golden age of L & N home rule. Under his leadership the company extended lines into the coal fields of eastern Kentucky and the mineral beds of northern Alabama. During the 1880s and 1890s the L & N built, leased, or absorbed more than fifty smaller roads. Then in 1902, through a convoluted sequence of Wall Street maneuvers, controlling interest in the L & N passed into the hands of another system, the Atlantic Coast Line. The swallower had itself been swallowed, but not fully digested.

Despite this change of ownership, the L & N retained its separate identity as a system and continued to expand under Smith. Between 1902 and 1921 its mileage rose from 3,327 to 5,041, most of it in the form of more feeder lines into untapped regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama. The death of Smith in 1921 coincided with the opening of a new era in which the L & N, like other railroads, struggled to adjust to the radically changed conditions of post-World War I America. The age of expansion had ended, never to return except in the form of mergers.

Between 1921 and 1941 the L & N fought to regain its footing from the wear and tear of World War I and the economic cataclysm of the Great Depression. A flood of business during World War II relieved the financial distress at the cost of running the physical plant of the road to exhaustion. When the much-dreaded postwar depression did not materialize, the L & N launched a vigorous program of modernization in a dogged effort to keep up with a changing transportation scene that bore hard on all railroads.

Through these years of scrambling and adjustment the L & N maintained its separate identity despite being owned by another system. Its largest subsidiary was not so fortunate: in August 1957 the company absorbed the 1,043-mile Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis system, which it had controlled for seventy-seven years but had left as a separate entity. The L & N system remained largely unchanged until 1969, when it acquired the 135- mile Tennessee Central and the 287-mile Chicago & Eastern Illinois roads. Two years later the company purchased the 571-mile Monon Railroad, giving it a second route into Chicago. Yet even as the L & N absorbed its newest (and last) major acquisition, it was being targeted for the same fate.

It was at this point that the story told in the original edition ended.

During the early 1960s, two major movements emerged in the railroad industry. One was a drive to reorganize railroads into holding companies that separated out their non-rail assets and usually left the railroad itself as merely one of several divisions. The other involved a renewed wave of mergers that redrew the nations railway map in spectacular fashion. The first aimed to restructure individual firms, the second the industry as a whole. Together they promulgated the most drastic overhaul of the American railroad scene in history. Between 1955 and 1966 the Interstate Commerce Commission fielded no less than fifty applications for mergers of Class I railroads. In July 1967 the Atlantic Coast Line merged with its longtime rival, the Seaboard Air Line, to form a new company, the Seaboard Coast Line. Even as it swallowed smaller lines, the L & N found itself with a new owner.

The combined system, which embraced the Seaboard Coast Line, the L & N, and some smaller roads, totaled 16,000 miles of track and began to market itself as The Family Lines Rail System. Within the family the L & N maintained its own identity even though many administrative, marketing, and operations functions were integrated. The Seaboard also followed the trend of creating a holding company, Seaboard Coast Line Industries. In November 1971 this company increased its holding of L & N stock from 33 percent to 98 percent, giving it virtually complete ownership. Although L & N headquarters remained in Louisville, its officers presided over fewer and different functions than they had in earlier decades. The once mighty L & N system had become in effect a subsidiary in a larger entity.²

Then, in November 1980, the first stage of what seemed an inevitable mega-merger took place when Seaboard Coast Line Industries joined with the Chessie System, itself the product of a 1973 merger combining two proud and historic lines, the Baltimore & Ohio and the Chesapeake & Ohio, as well as the Western Maryland. The new company, which took the antiseptic name of CSX Corporation, planned to let the two rail systems function separately while coordinating operations and other activities as much as possible. Like most of the rail holding companies born after 1960, CSX diversified into a variety of interests besides transportation, although the railroads continued to provide most of its assets and revenues. This arrangement lasted only until January 1983, when Seaboard’s five Family Lines merged into one new company, the Seaboard System Railroad. At that moment the L & N ceased to exist as a separate entity.

But the merger mania did not stop there. Late in 1985 CSX announced plans for a major reorganization that over the next few years combined the former Chessie roads and the infant Seaboard System Railroad into one giant railroad, CSX Transportation—itself a division of the larger CSX holding company. By 1987 this restructuring was complete. In 1995 this colossus led the nation’s railroads in operating revenues and had become one of two great systems east of the Mississippi River. In 2000 it operated 1,500 trains daily across twenty-three states. No city could find in the railroad’s name the slightest trace of its roots or components, yet within its labyrinth of corporate charters could be found a significant part of the railroad history of the South. Louisville, once the center of the L & N rail universe, became the Midwest region headquarters for CSXT.

A similar fate befell the two great giants of eastern railroading, the Pennsylvania and the New York Central. Once the most powerful and prestigious systems in the nation, they ran afoul of hard times and in 1968 did the unthinkable by combining to form the Penn Central in what proved to be one of the most bungled and ill-starred mergers of all time. Two years later the Penn Central crashed into bankruptcy and in 1976 became part of a new corporation called Conrail, which also swept into its shaky structure a host of other bankrupt roads including the Erie, Jersey Central, Reading, and Lehigh Valley. Conrail limped along until 1999, when most of its mileage was parceled out to CSX and the Norfolk Southern—the latter a concoction formed by combining two major southern systems, the Southern and the Norfolk & Western.

Back in 1888, during a meeting of rail moguls seeking ways and means of relief from their constant wars and fighting, Collis P. Huntington—the man who created not only the Southern Pacific but the Chesapeake & Ohio as well—declared that When there is only one railroad company in the United States … it will be better for everybody concerned, and the sooner this takes place the better.³ The One Big Railroad never happened, but it has drawn nearer to realization than anyone of Huntington’s generation ever dreamed. Today four mega-systems dominate the American rail map: CSXT and the Norfolk Southern east of the Mississippi River and the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) west of it.

Like their eastern counterparts, both of the western giants followed the familiar pattern of absorbing one rival after another. The Union Pacific gobbled up the Chicago & Northwestern, Katy, Missouri Pacific, Western Pacific, and Southern Pacific, among others, while the BNSF enfolded the Burlington, Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Spokane, Portland & Seattle, St. Louis & San Francisco, and Santa Fe into its enormous system. Every one of those systems, like the L & N, represented a conglomeration of lines large and small that had been built or acquired over the years. A huge part of American railroad history now dangles somewhere on the family trees of only four systems.

Thus has the tangled trail of consolidation led to the demise of nearly all the familiar railroad company names, logos, and landmarks during the past century, and especially the last thirty years. Today many people are surprised when told that the railroads are not only still around but carrying huge amounts of traffic. Their puzzlement stems from the fact that most people knew the railroads firsthand only as passengers, even though the passenger business had always been the smallest and least profitable part of the railroads’ work. As the railroads gradually unloaded the despised passenger business onto a newly created government corporation called Amtrak beginning in May 1971, they all but vanished from the eyes of that large segment of the public that did not work for, ship goods on, or live near a rail line. Between the mergers and the dropping of passenger traffic, then, the railroads lost their identity in two important ways.

And all this has happened in the thirty years since this volume first appeared.

Many years ago, the fine singer Jean Ritchie recorded a song called The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore, which mourned the passing of a played-out coal mining town. It is a beautiful and nostalgic song, and today it rings true in quite another way. The system of railroads built and acquired by the L & N over the years continues to operate and do a thriving business. The tracks and all their appurtenances are still there, but they have long since lost their original identity and become anonymous components. The railroad still serves most of the same cities and towns, but the L & N don’t stop there anymore.

Maury Klein

East Greenwich, Rhode Island

Notes

1.  United States Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), 2:728; United States Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States 1997 (Washington, 1997), 643. The Interstate Commerce Commission in 1911 began classifying railroads according to what became a sliding scale of earnings. For an explanation of the classification system see Statistical Abstract 1997, 616.

2.  Basic information about the L & N during the period after 1970 is taken from Charles B. Castner, Ronald Flanary, and Patrick Dorin, Louisville & Nashville Railroad: The Old Reliable (Lynchburg, Va., 1996). I am grateful to Charles B. Castner for supplying information in the same helpful manner as during the original research for the book.

3.  Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore, 1986), 437.

Introduction

It is always tempting to cast the history of a company into the form of a biography. Indeed the resort to anthropomorphic metaphor is irresistible, especially for the early stages of corporate development in the nineteenth century. The newborn firm appears to pass through periods that might be called infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Its original functions seem relatively simple and clearly defined at first, only to become more complex as it grows older. Gradually the company assumes an unmistakable character, even a personality, usually derived from the style and purpose of the men who dominate it. In some cases, particularly during the early stages, the personality of the firm may seem indistinguishable from the men who control it.

Appealing as this approach might be, it should on the whole be strenuously resisted. We live in an age dominated by what Kenneth Boulding has called the organizational revolution, and much confusion has resulted from our inability to grasp the far-reaching implications of that fact. Nowhere does this shortcoming become more evident than in our persistent determination to personify corporations, to conceive of them merely as extended or enlarged individuals. In 1873 the Supreme Court of the United States embedded this viewpoint into our legal tradition by ruling in the Slaughterhouse cases that the corporation was in effect an individual under the law and therefore entitled to the protection of the Fourteenth Amendment.

But the American corporation has usually fast outgrown any similarity to this metaphor. It outlives its creators and often grows to proportions unimagined by them. Enlargement brings with it added complexity and specialization which in turn radically change all the firm’s inner relationships. The enterprise soon begins to acquire a momentum of its own, one that is not easily harnessed or controlled by the men who are responsible for its direction. Through sheer size and longevity it frustrates the most determined efforts to define and achieve its purposes and to adapt it to changing conditions. Originally the vehicle of ambitious individuals, it becomes a separate and imposing entity that reduces its creators (and their successors) to creatures struggling to keep some sort of rein upon the newly emerged leviathan.

It is within this crude framework that I have attempted to depict the history of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. No doubt through habit and limitations of vision I have failed to remain consistent to this objective, but it has served as my model. To that end I have tried to portray the growth of the organization itself, especially during its formative years, and I have attempted to explicate the aims and ambitions of the men who founded the company and shaped its destiny. By 1884, when Milton H. Smith first assumed the presidency, the basic structure and direction of the L & N had been achieved, and its future managers were compelled to work within that fundamental context. Throughout the book I have refrained from referring to the road by its familiar nickname, the Old Reliable, in order to remove any connotations of public relations slogans from its actual functions or achievements.

As always I have contracted more debts of gratitude, intellectual and otherwise, than can possibly be acknowledged in these brief lines. Numerous individuals have played an immediate and invaluable role in the preparation of this manuscript. I am especially grateful to the officers and employees of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad Company for providing me with access to company records and documents. While the entire staff was unfailingly cooperative and generous, certain individuals proved indispensable to my work. President William H. Kendall sanctioned my rummaging through the company archives and gave me the interview that is used in the epilogue. William C. Tayse took a large segment of time from his crowded schedule to furnish me with maps, photographs, and other material for the project. Most of all, Charles B. Castner of the Public Relations Department cheerfully and promptly attended to my every need and unearthed whatever information or statistics I requested. Without his loyal assistance and interest this book would be a much poorer piece. To countless others of the L & N staff I am deeply grateful. None of them bear any responsibility for the final product, however, and the company neither provided financial support nor imposed any supervision or restrictions upon the manuscript.

As usual the library staff of the University of Rhode Island proved uniformly helpful. I am especially indebted to Abner Gaines and Kathleen Schlenker for their aid in locating materials. A number of people, Betty Hanke, Barbara Jones, Edith Beckers, Gail Rabasca, Diane Babcock, and Lisa Andrews, stoically endured the chores of typing and spot research. Judith Swift provided important comic relief. Finally, I appreciate the concern and valuable suggestions of my two editors and friends, Thomas B. Brewer and Richard C. Overton. Their efforts improved the manuscript considerably; for whatever errors that remain, however, I am responsible.

MAURY KLEIN

Kingston, Rhode Island

June 1, 1972

1

A Town Grows Legs: The Birth of the L & N

From its beginning Louisville was a city destined to prosper or perish on its commerce. Founded in 1779, the town scarcely exceeded a settlement for several decades; in 1800 it counted only 359 inhabitants. Even so, Congress recognized its potential enough to designate it a port of entry in 1799, the only such port not located on the Atlantic seaboard. The title meant very little at the time, for Louisville lacked that most necessary requisite for commerce: transportation facilities. Two possible arteries reached southward into the interior: the Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Cumberland river systems, and the crude overland trails like the Natchez Trace and the Louisville and Nashville turnpikes. Neither mode saw much traffic in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

After 1811, however, when the first steamboat appeared on the Ohio River, the scene changed quickly. Three years later Louisville welcomed its first steamboat, and by 1819 sixty-eight steamboats were plying western waters along with large numbers of barges and keelboats. Already Louisville was emerging as an export center to the South for such commodities as beef, pork, bacon, flour, whiskey, lard, rope and hemp, tobacco, steam engines, and other manufactured products. Most of this traffic moved south by water but some went overland, notably the stocks of hog and mule drovers, slave traders, and the goods of itinerant peddlers.

Expanding commerce meant growth and expansion. In 1820 the population reached 4,012; in 1840, 21,120; and by 1860 it totalled 68,033, twelfth largest in the United States. Manufacturing had come into the city as well. By 1850 the city had several iron and stove foundries and produced steam engines and other machinery. But Louisville remained primarily a distribution center despite the growth of manufacturing. A contemporary observer made this point clear in 1852:

Louisville contains twenty-five exclusively wholesale DRY GOODS houses, whose sales are made only to dealers and whose market reaches from Northern Louisiana to Northern Kentucky and embraces a large part of the States of Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Illinois, Mississippi and Arkansas. The amount of annual sales by these houses five million, eight hundred and fifty-three thousand (5,853,000) dollars. . . . There are thirty-nine wholesale grocery houses, whose aggregate sales reach ten million, six hundred and twenty-three thousand, four hundred (10,623,400) dollars.¹

Such impressive growth did not come without problems. For its own needs as well as its livelihood Louisville depended heavily upon the fickle waterways. Some of the river’s problems it could solve. When expanding river traffic made the Ohio River falls an intolerable obstacle, a canal was built around them. Completed in 1833, the canal received some 1,585 steamboats, flatboats, and keelboats totaling 169,885 tons that same year. But no amount of enterprise could solve the major problems of low water, severe meandering, and physical obstacles.

The dry seasons left Louisville without any reliable connection with the outside world to obtain coal or other necessities. Improvements had been made in the overland routes and new projects abounded (at least on paper), but the turnpikes offered no permanent solution to the heavy flow of traffic.

To make matters worse, Louisville’s most bitter commercial rival, Cincinnati, had already cast an appraising glance at the potential of interior southern markets. Though founded 40 year later, the Queen City quickly outstripped Louisville. By 1840 Cincinnati boasted twice as many people and an impressive transportation system that included three canals, a river navigation project, several roads and turnpikes, and a few nascent railroads. Within a decade a contemporary observer could list fourteen macadamized roads, totaling 514 miles, and twenty railroads reaching the city. As yet all but two of these works traversed the region north of the Ohio River. Cincinnati’s primary commercial activity remained firmly rooted in the Ohio Valley, and that commitment was not likely to change. But more than one energetic businessman pondered the problem of how to reach the rich southern markets as well.

Confronted by this combination of internal frustration and external threat, ambitious Louisvillians grappled with their transportation problem. The successful advent of the railroad in the early 1830s offered a practical if expensive solution. A road from Louisville to Nashville would free the Kentucky city from the tyranny of low water—during which times Nashville actually became a serious competitor as distributing center for the border region. A railroad would not only avert commercial isolation, it would also neutralize Nashville and steal a march on Cincinnati in the quest for southern markets. This last point was no idle fancy, for a stupendous project to build a road from Charleston to Cincinnati had already been conceived.

The stakes of commercial rivalry were too high to dismiss such grandiose schemes out of hand. To survive Louisville needed to have a reliable connection to the interior. A road from Louisville to Nashville would be very expensive, risky, fraught with financial and engineering problems, and taxing upon the resources of all involved. It could conceivably lead to fantastic success, outright disaster, or the disillusioned abandonment that became the fate of so many opulent internal improvement projects. Regardless of the perils, several merchants, citizens, and editors understood clearly that the effort had to be made if Louisville wished to keep her future alive.

Voices in the Wilderness

The agitation for a railroad from Louisville to the South began as early as 1832 and continued throughout the decade. One peripheral project, a road between Lexington and Louisville, made some headway, but other works received little support in Kentucky. The vast intersectional projects originating in Charleston and New Orleans absorbed considerable public attention even though neither road made significant progress. By the mid-1830s economic conditions had soured, and the panic of 1837 with its resulting seven-year depression dampened any lingering ardor for expensive projects. For over a decade the idea lay dormant.

The return of prosperity in the late 1840s changed the strategic situation abruptly. Tennessee in general and Nashville in particular renewed transportation schemes designed to capture southern markets for themselves. Two important lines, the first linking Nashville to Chattanooga and the second connecting Memphis and Chattanooga, were under construction. The strategically located Western & Atlantic Railroad between Chattanooga and Atlanta, completed in 1850, opened the rich interior of the Southeast and the Atlantic seaboard to Tennessee once the state finished its own roads. Nashville lavished aid on the railway projects in an attempt to end its dependence on the river and to advance its bid to become the great distributing center of the South if the Tennessee roads were built and Louisville remained inert. In addition Charleston and Savannah, through their railroad connections, were already seeking to strip Louisville of its domination of the tobacco market.

Other towns in Kentucky added to the pressure on Louisville. On December 17, 1849, a group of Glasgow citizens appointed a committee to ask the Tennessee legislature for a charter to construct a railroad from Nashville to the Kentucky state line. A week later a meeting in Bowling Green adopted resolutions urging the construction of a Louisville to Nashville railroad. If this were not enough, Nashville interests responded to such pleas by proposing a line far enough north to penetrate the Louisville market without actually entering the city. Such a road would effectively isolate Louisville between Cincinnati north of the Ohio and Nashville south of the river.

Louisville delayed no longer. A mass meeting of interested citizens early in 1850 adopted a resolution offering to subscribe $1,000,000 of city funds in a Louisville road and appointed a committee to investigate the proposal. One of the chief proponents of the road, Governor John L. Helm, who had advocated a north-south line for nearly fifteen years, used his influence to enlighten the state legislature. That body already had before it a bill seeking a charter for a railroad from Louisville to Bowling Green. To broaden its scope, the bill was amended to delete the town names and provide the company with complete freedom in locating the road. Eventually a bill passed the Kentucky senate approving several projects, including one connecting Louisville to the Mississippi River near the mouth of the Ohio.

On March 5,.1850, the legislature granted a second charter, this one to a company specifically interested in building a road between Louisville and Nashville. The charter authorized construction of a road from Louisville to the Tennessee state line, a capital stock of $3,000,000, and provisions for two branches. The first branch would leave the main line a few miles above the Rolling Fork River and extend to Lebanon; the second branch, located about five miles south of Bowling Green, would reach toward Clarksville and Memphis. The branch lines suggested the influence of downstate counties in protecting their interests, but the final charter owed more to the energetic Louisvillians than to anyone else.

The Tennessee legislature had already done its part. On February 9 it approved the charter for a road between Nashville and the present town of Guthrie, Kentucky, on the state line. But it guarded Nashville’s interests carefully by hedging the charter with restrictions: the road could approach Nashville only to the northern bank of the Cumberland River; it must pass through the town of Gallatin; and the railroad could convey freight across the river into Nashville only with horse-drawn wagons. Otherwise, the legislature reasoned, Nashville might become a mere way station instead of a terminus for traffic. Like their Louisville counterparts, Nashville merchants were all too aware of the stakes of commercial rivalry to overlook any detail. They envisioned a future in which Louisville would be an important satellite to the Tennessee capital, a relationship that might suddenly be reversed if Louisvillians gained control of the new company.

In short, the L & N Railroad was decidedly an offspring of the growing commercial rivalry between Louisville and Nashville. As the contrast between the company’s two charters reveals, both towns saw the road as their chief weapon in the battle not only against each other but against such potential outsiders as Cincinnati, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Memphis, and even New Orleans as well. Nor was the contest limited to the major competitors, for every hamlet and county in the vicinity between Louisville and Nashville viewed the project as a potential vehicle for its own prosperity. There ensued a mad scramble among these locales to persuade the new company to locate its line in their backyards. Increasingly the various factions interested in the road, especially the major towns, tended to view the yet unbuilt road as their company, whose chief duty was to advance the commercial ambitions of the community. Unhappily the company could not serve so many masters successfully, and it might one day develop goals of its own that differed and even conflicted with those of the various communities. But that day lay in the dim future, and meanwhile the road had yet to be built.

Machines in the Garden

Construction of the L & N easily qualified as Kentucky’s biggest and most ambitious project of its time. Formidable engineering and construction problems awaited the contractors, and equally complex financial problems faced the new company. The proposed line would traverse an agricultural and mining region populated mostly by farmers, and it remained to be seen whether their local business could sustain so expensive an enterprise. Thus two immediate problems confronted the company: it had to choose the most practicable route, and it had to raise the necessary funds for so great a project. In a real sense the problems were related, for selection of the route depended not only upon engineering factors but also upon the competition among towns and counties to subscribe to the venture if they were included on the right of way.

That competition began at once. On June 17, 1851, the Louisville General Council approved a subscription of $1,000,000 to the new company. Subscription books were opened on September 4 and, after $100,000 had been subscribed, the company elected its first directors on September 27. The L & N’s first president, Levin L. Shreve, a prominent Louisville businessman, tried to deal simultaneously with the twin problems of money and location. Three surveying parties were put in the field, two working from Louisville and one from the north bank of the Cumberland. An early attempt to obtain federal aid for the road got nowhere. That left the directors with no choice but to solicit their funds from the welter of conflicting local sources.

L. L. Shreve, first president of the L & N, from September 27, 1851, to October 2, 1854.

A few subscriptions proved uncontroversial. Louisville later added $500,000 to its original subscription and private subscriptions ultimately totaled $928,700. Among the downstate counties, however, competition broke out between two alternative routes. The first, called the lower route, traversed Hardin, Grayson, Edmondson, Warren, and Simpson counties through such towns as Elizabethtown, Bowling Green, and Franklin. The upper or air-line route passed through Nelson, Larue, Hart, Barren, and Allen counties and included Bardstown, Glasgow, Scottsville, and New Haven as way stations. On September 29, 1851, the L & N board shrewdly passed a resolution stating that they had no preference for either route and that local subscription pledges should determine the decision.

Proponents of both routes took their cue and opened a hot bidding war. Among the lower route counties Hardin pledged $300,000, Grayson $300,000, Warren $300,000, and Simpson $100,000. The upper counties did not fare as well. Glasgow eventually offered $300,000, Hart County $100,000, and some of the other counties lesser amounts. But Nelson County, where Bardstown had so long advocated a north-south railroad, rejected a proposed $300,000 bond issue after a bitter fight. In Tennessee the fight went on no less energetically. Sumner and Davidson counties, through which either route might pass, each subscribed $300,000. A meeting at the Davidson County Courthouse on January 21, 1852, adopted a resolution favoring the upper route. As other meetings assembled elsewhere to adopt counter resolutions, local editors launched their own war of words.

Basically the dispute crystallized around the conflicting ambitions of Bowling Green on the lower route and Glasgow on the upper. The upper route was shorter but offered more serious engineering problems. The lower route passed through some large coal beds and could easily be linked to Memphis. This latter point grew increasingly important as citizens in the counties west of the lower route talked emphatically of the need for a road connecting Memphis to Louisville. Robertson County, Tennessee, went so far as to pledge $200,000 if the road went through its borders.

But the most dramatic step came from the town of Bowling Green. Painfully aware of the importance of the railroad to their future, certain of its citizens had obtained in 1850 a charter for the Bowling Green & Tennessee Railroad. Unwilling to tolerate the L & N’s vacillation over its route, these same citizens received a similar charter from the Tennessee legislature on February 13, 1852, and announced their intention of building a railroad from Bowling Green to Nashville. Such a parallel line would be an enormous waste of resources, but the company promptly put surveyors in the field and opened subscription books. When Bowling Green citizens approved a subscription of $1,000,000 to the company’s stock, the L & N board could no longer ignore the threat. On May 29, 1852, the board authorized Shreve to negotiate a consolidation of the two companies.

The independent action of Bowling Green may not have been the only factor in choosing the final route, but it certainly played a major part. The consolidation took place that same summer and the L & N gratefully absorbed the Bowling Green million dollar subscription. Soon afterward the other pieces fell into place. The company accepted Hardin County’s pledge and promised to put Elizabethtown on the line. Gallatin, Tennessee, received a similar assurance in return for the Sumner County subscription. The lower route had prevailed. A series of amendments to the charter, granted on March 20, 1851, legalized the public subscriptions and authorized the company to connect with the Mobile & Ohio, the proposed Memphis line, and the Ohio River just below the mouth of the Tennessee River. Even the suspicious Tennessee legislature relented somewhat and approved the amended charter in December.

Early in 1853 the situation looked promising for early completion of the road. The company had nearly $4,000,000 in subscriptions and its charter authorized the issue of $800,000 in bonds if necessary to complete construction. The surveying parties under chief engineer L. L. Robinson had declared the final route via Bowling Green the only practicable route as regards cost, and ability to construct the Road, that can be found between Louisville and Nashville.² The survey estimated cost of construction at $5,000,000 and Robinson departed for England to let contracts. While there he negotiated the placing of $2,500,000 worth of bonds but could make no suitable construction deal. Turning closer to home, the L & N management on April 13, 1853, signed a contract with Morton, Seymour & Company to build the entire road. For the sum of $35,000 per mile that well known construction firm promised to complete the 185-mile road in thirty months.

Despite this auspicious start the project ground to a temporary halt almost immediately. The first iron contract, signed in June, 1853, called for 3,000 tons to be delivered during the first three months of 1854. Grading, masonry, bridge and railway superstructure work began in May, 1853, only to be suspended for lack of funds. The bonds Robinson placed had not been delivered immediately, and the Crimean War, coupled with crop failures in Europe, depressed the bond market enough to cause the L & N negotiation to collapse. Of the batch only $750,000 were eventually placed, and these in Paris. Subscription money from the various towns and counties was to be paid in installments over a period of time. Most of the pledges came in promptly but in too small amounts to meet immediate needs.

Steeped in gloom, Shreve had no choice but to order total suspension of work in June. Robinson, who had written a thorough analysis of the road’s potential revenue sources, returned from London and resigned as chief engineer. Dissatisfaction over the project arose in Louisville, where the board of aldermen expressed a lack of confidence in Shreve and his board. Part of the squabble involved certain Louisvillians who objected strenuously to the location of the L & N’s depot at 9th and Broadway. Determined to have their way, they threatened to scuttle the whole project if all else failed. The aldermen also resented the board’s inability to present an exact report of expenditures. During a convention on June 24 Shreve, absent in Europe, resigned by letter. Eventually the aldermen backed down, but Shreve insisted that his resignation stand. On October 2, 1854, he was replaced by none other than Governor Helm.

John L. Helm, president of the L & N from October 2, 1854, to October 2, 1860.

Efforts to revive work on the line went slowly and met endless frustration. Marion County had subscribed $200,000 for a branch to Lebanon, but unprecedented low waters during the late summer prevented the delivery of any iron. That delay further aggravated existing financial problems. The original contractor, Morton, Seymour & Company, grew disgusted and withdrew from their contract. The new contractor, Justin, Edsall & Hawley, began work in September, 1854, but could proceed no faster than funds trickled in. Both the city of Louisville and the Tennessee legislature took steps to furnish immediate financial aid.

The Louisville assistance was designed primarily to complete the Lebanon branch, and to that end the company sought to complete the first thirty-mile portion of road to New Haven. In July of 1855 the first rails went down and two months later the entire section of roadbed was ready for iron. During August a special train toured the completed eight-mile stretch of track. Still the work went slowly amidst an array of hardships. An epidemic of cholera depleted the labor force, a crop failure inflicted great suffering, another drought brought river traffic to a halt, and delayed the delivery of materials. Abroad Europe remained at war and at home sectional strife moved ever closer to the boiling point. At the local level the L & N found itself at war with some of its subscribers—notably the Tennesseans, who resented the fact that all construction work was taking place on the Louisville end. Many optimists had predicted completion of the road by 1855; that year had come and nearly gone, and some observers wondered whether the road would ever be finished.

Rivers to Cross and Mountains to Climb

According to Robinson’s thorough report of 1854 the construction crews would encounter no serious obstacles beyond a few minor rivers until the line reached Muldraugh’s Hill, a few miles north of Elizabethtown. The hill, a solid 500-foot limestone structure perpendicular to the route, presented the most imposing engineering problem on the road, and there was no good way around it. The tunnel proposed for it was to be 1,986 feet long and would pass 135 feet below the summit. Robinson estimated the cost of grading the five-mile stretch at $520,000.

Beyond Muldraugh lay the Green River, rimmed by hills on the north and smaller knobs to the south. Any approach to the river would be high and difficult, and the cost of a bridge was figured at $140,000. But the finished product proved to be the largest iron bridge in the United States with a total length, including approaches, of 1,800 feet. Final cost ran closer to $165,000. Once past the Green, the crews would confront a landscape of undulating cavernous limestone formations until they crossed the Barren River. No other obstacles would delay work until the line reached Simpson County, where the countryside gradually rose to the summit of the Tennessee Ridge, which divided the Barren and Cumberland rivers. The Ridge lay perpendicular to any possible route, being unbroken between Clarksville and the Cumberland Mountains. Like Muldraugh’s Hill it had a gradual fall on one side and a sharp precipice on the other, with short, rapid drainage to the river. The rest of the route to Nashville offered little respite, running through heavy rolling limestone formations.

As the financial picture slowly brightened in 1856, the company pushed its crews forward and succeeded in restoring a semblance of public confidence. For one thing, the courts upheld the legality of the county bond issues to aid a private corporation. For another, Louisville approved a second $1,000,000 subscription to the company. By midyear the company had expended $1,212,137 on construction and opened twenty-six miles of road. With another $2,000,000 at hand the board put the whole road from Louisville to Nashville under contract and ordered 7,500 tons of iron for the main line. By October the line reached Lebanon Junction and work commenced on the branch to Lebanon. Completion of that link would be especially important, for it would provide a source of income to the struggling company from a potential market of about fifteen southern and eastern counties.

The most formidable obstacle of the original line: a view of Muldraug’s Hill in the late 1850s.

In driving the work forward Helm lost no opportunity to emphasize the importance of the road to local interests. Much of the grading and other work had been let to farmers along the route who took their pay in company bonds. Helm applauded this exchange as a significant step in making the road a home interest. In the Annual Report for 1857 he noted proudly,

That the people along the line should become the holders of these bonds is eminently proper. By such sale and purchase you secure for your road many active and influential friends, and secure for it the management of real friends. Such purchases are usually made by men whose business or property will be advanced by the road. ... It will be a proud achievement if Tennessee and Kentucky will, as they can, build this great connecting link in the chain of roads south and north, without subjecting it to liens and mortgages held by capitalists who have no other motive than that of profit and ultimate ownership.

Helm had more than regional patriotism for which to thank the local farmers and workmen, for the spiraling cost of labor and supplies put a severe strain on the company’s outside contractors. Moreover, work was delayed by low water and by the inability of Louisville bonds to attract buyers. Indeed the latter could not even be exchanged for goods and services, and at one point Helm personally redeemed $20,000 in Hardin County bonds. As usual expenses exceeded original estimates, and hurried requests for emergency funds led inevitably to charges of mismanagement. Disgruntled by the meager amount of iron laid at their end of the road, Nashville interests renewed their cries of conspiracy. Nevertheless, by autumn of 1857 the tide had turned. To ease the financial crisis several Louisville interests stepped in and purchased $300,000 worth of the L & N bonds. Their action kept the company in funds until the bond market loosened. At the same time two key men took positions with the L & N and did much to guide the last steps of construction. James Guthrie, former Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin Pierce, assumed the vice presidency. Born in Nelson County in 1792, Guthrie attended school in Bardstown before going into business at the age of twenty. For a time he hauled produce to New Orleans on flatboats. When that enterprise did not slake his ambitions, he returned to Bardstown, studied law, and opened a practice in Louisville in 1820. He accepted a position as prosecuting attorney for the county and pursued his duties so vigorously that on one occasion an incensed rival lawyer shot him. The wound left Guthrie lame for life but only reinforced his enormous energy, coarse demeanor, and powerful will.

James Guthrie, who as president completed the L & N and guided it during the difficult years of the Civil War, from October 2, 1860, to June 11, 1868.

During the 1820s Guthrie plunged into politics with gusto. He became an ardent Jacksonian Democrat, served nine years in the state legislature before declining renomination, and was president of Kentucky’s constitutional convention in 1851. Though business commitments increasingly absorbed his attention, he gravitated into national politics. While Secretary of the Treasury he gained some reputation as a reformer. He won election to the United States Senate in 1865 but retired after three years because of ill health. In business Guthrie played a vital role in raising funds for several Kentucky rail projects. He also helped secure charters for the Bank of Louisville and the University of Louisville. His political shrewdness and indomitable personality did much to remove the last financial obstacles confronting the L & N.

Albert Fink entered the company’s service as a construction engineer but soon rose to general superintendent. Born in 1827 in Lauterbach, Germany, he migrated to the United States in 1849 after completing college in Germany. Trained as an engineer, he won an impressive reputation as a bridge designer. He was the first engineer in America to attempt a 200-foot span, and his effort, the Baltimore & Ohio Bridge over the Monongahela River at Fairmont, Virginia, earned him lavish praise.

Fink remained in the service of the B & O until the road’s completion in 1857. His move to the L & N gave him the opportunity to display a variety of talents. His genius for engineering continued to be widely acclaimed. It was he who designed the Green River Bridge which, like the Fairmont span, utilized his own invention, the Fink Bridge Truss. With the L & N, however, he revealed great executive and administrative ability as well, though he remained deeply involved in the study of railroad problems. Standing six foot seven and dubbed the Teutonic Giant, Fink was destined to leave a deep imprint on the L & N’s history.

Under fresh leadership and with the financial crisis solved, work went forward rapidly. By November the company was operating seventy- four miles of road out of Louisville and twenty-seven miles north of Nashville. The Muldraugh’s Hill tunnel neared completion and only the several long bridges remained to be built. Lebanon welcomed its first train early in 1858, and on March 8 trains began running a regular schedule on the branch. An impressive new depot in Louisville, designed by Fink and far advanced of similar structures elsewhere, was dedicated in 1858. When Mayor John Barbee declared a half-holiday on the occasion a huge crowd turned out to hear the speeches and to watch President Helm roll the first barrel of freight into a freight car. After the small wood-burning locomotive chugged slowly away, the cheering crowd milled curiously around the 23-acre depot grounds.

L & N passenger train on the widely acclaimed Green River Bridge in 1859.

Helm hoped to complete the road before Christmas of 1859. To insure ready cash for all remaining work Guthrie executed a $2,000,000 mortgage upon the main line. The company closed a contract with the federal government for handling the mails, and arranged to purchase the Kentucky Locomotive Works at Louisville. Shops were also being constructed in Louisville, a turntable forty-five feet in diameter had been installed, and a tank house went up along with two 12,000-gallon tanks. As of October 1, 1858, the company operated ten locomotives, seven passenger cars, three baggage cars, thirty-two box cars, and 102 miscellaneous cars. It had long ceased to be a paper enterprise.

Steadily the gap between the Louisville and Nashville crews narrowed. On August 10, 1859, the road opened from Nashville to Bowling Green, less than twenty miles from the approaching Louisville line. A great barbecue for 10,000 people at Nashville celebrated the road’s entry into Bowling Green, and already through trips to Louisville were being run by a combination of rail and stagecoach in only sixteen hours—some eleven hours faster than the old stagecoach time. The Green River Bridge had been completed, though the tunnel at Muldraugh’s Hill would not be finished until April, 1860. To avoid delay the crews put down temporary track for the ascent.

Part of the first L & N passenger station at 9th and Broadway in Louisville, opened in 1858.

It seemed clear that Helm would have his line completed before Christmas. On September 6 a delegation assembled in Nashville to celebrate the impending triumph. The Kentucky crews laid their last rail on October 8 and their Tennessee counterparts finished ten days later. On October 27 a special train with 200 passengers, including the L & N board of directors, the mayor of Louisville, various councilmen, newspapermen, and other notables, left the Kentucky city for the first run to Nashville. Crowds lined the track for much of the distance and numerous stops were made. About twenty miles from Nashville the special was met by a sister train bearing an equally heavy burden of dignitaries, including Helm and Vernon K. Stevenson, president of the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad and a leading Tennessee railroad entrepreneur.

After an overnight stop at Edgefield the excursionists proceeded across the Cumberland River Bridge to a formal reception by Nashville’s mayor and city council. Later the governor entertained the entire party at the state capitol. This last leg of the journey, across the Cumberland River, had been made possible by a change of heart in the Tennessee legislature. Eventually that body had allowed the L & N to cross the river and establish a depot in Nashville, and in 1855 loaned the L & N and the Edgefield & Kentucky Railroad $100,000 jointly to construct the bridge. To demonstrate the bridge’s strength to the visiting parties, three locomotives were put on the span at one time. After a sumptuous round of wining and dining the train returned to Louisville on October 29. Two days later trains began running a regular schedule between the terminal cities: two passenger trains each way every day except Sunday, when only one was run, and one daily through freight train.

More than nine years after receiving its charter, the L & N had completed its line. The final cost amounted to $6,674,249 on the main stem and $1,007,736 on the Lebanon branch. The debt of the main line totaled $4,705,500 with annual interest of $279,830, and the company sorely lacked adequate rolling stock for its new role as a through line. Even the moment of jubilation was marred by the resurgence of demands that Helm resign the presidency.

For some time Helm had been under fire from certain stockholders who accused him of incompetence and exorbitant expenditures on constructing the road. Stubbornly Helm refused to resign until his line was finished, but once the through connection was made he could no longer fend off his detractors. On February 4, 1860, two L & N directors published an open letter demanding Helm’s resignation on the grounds that they had voted for his reelection only on condition that he step down once the road was completed. After a sharp exchange of words Helm got no support from his board and resigned on February 21, to be replaced by Guthrie. One other factor had contributed to his downfall, and had in fact been a storm center of controversy for a decade: the Memphis branch.

The Wayward Branch

The Memphis branch originated in the clashing hopes and fears among merchants in Memphis, Louisville, and the towns between the two cities. In each city a substantial number of citizens argued that such a road would enrich the trade of both towns and, more important, free them from the tyranny of the river. This last point proved decisive, for by the late 1840s the Mississippi and Ohio rivers above Memphis had become dangerously unreliable. Perilously low during droughts and clogged with snags and treacherous sandbars, the waters took a frightful toll of the larger, heavier steamers of the era. And the situation grew worse every year. By the 1850s it was considered foolhardy to risk a valuable cargo on the river, where losses reached nearly a ship a day and the shells of grounded steamers littered the shoreline. One contemporary Cincinnatian estimated that losses of river craft during 1855–56 were high enough to build a railroad from Louisville to Memphis with enough left over to operate the road.

The opposition to a Louisville railroad, no less devoted to local interests than their Kentucky counterparts, feared that the project would result in a drain of Memphis trade to Nashville. These same interests had also opposed a proposed road from Memphis to Nashville but in vain. After three years of diverse agitation the Nashville & Tennessee Railroad Company obtained a charter from the legislature in 1852. The charter authorized construction of a road from Memphis to Paris, Tennessee, a distance of 130 miles. Beyond Paris the future was uncertain. The road might go on to Nashville, head directly for Louisville, or seek a connection with the yet incomplete L & N. Another road, the Memphis & Charleston, had already begun construction toward Chattanooga.

At about the same time certain Louisville interests, part of the L & N’s management, and the two counties southwest of Bowling Green (Logan and Simpson) developed their own interest in a Memphis branch connecting to the L & N at Bowling Green. To some this interest reflected a vision of bringing Memphis and its surrounding territory under Louisville’s commercial influence; to others the branch meant only a device to broaden support of the L & N project itself. Robinson made a preliminary survey between Louisville and Memphis and found the route very favorable. His line scarcely varied half a mile from an airline and had very modest grades. In his 1854 report Robinson recommended such a branch and Helm later supported it ardently, but for the time being nothing was done.

While the Louisvillians dawdled, the Tennessee towns seized the initiative. At once the familiar chess game commenced over both the proposed route to Paris and the destination beyond. Each of the three alternatives beyond Paris received support, with many merchants in both Memphis and Louisville leaning toward a connection with the L & N. The severe coal shortage in Louisville during November, 1853, caused by low water, spurred that city’s efforts to eliminate dependence upon the river as quickly as possible. Nearly half the population of Louisville depended for their livelihood upon industry, which in turn depended upon a regular supply of coal. The Memphis line promised to secure coal from western Kentucky mines much more cheaply than the cost of Pittsburgh coal.

At last the Louisville interests acted. On December 5, 1853, the Tennessee legislature authorized a charter for the Memphis to Louisville Airline Railroad Company. Eleven days later the Nashville & Memphis Company obtained amendments to its charter that facilitated connection to the Airline. Both companies received the right to connect with a third company, the Memphis, Clarksville & Louisville. This road, no less a product of commercial fears and ambitions, originated with the Bowling Green & Tennessee—the project used so effectively by Bowling Green interests to lure the L & N main line to their city. When the pretense of building to Nashville was dropped, the Tennessee legislature in January, 1852, chartered a new road from Memphis to Louisville via Clarksville. The new company, composed of both Kentucky and Tennessee interests, received the right to start construction at any time and connect with any other company, including the L & N at Bowling Green.

Coming as it did on top of the projects mentioned earlier, the Clarksville seemed like one more piece in a bewildering jigsaw puzzle. If the relationships of companies seeking a line between Louisville and Memphis seem hopelessly entangled, it is only because they were. The reasons for the confusion, overlapping, and outright duplication can only be touched on here. They include the fiercely conflicting commercial aspirations of all the towns and counties involved (especially Memphis), indecision among the Louisville interests, sharp disagreement over whether the road should go to Louisville or Nashville, the L & N’s absorption in its own problems, the hostility of some Nashville interests, and the eagerness of the State of Tennessee to get some system of roads linking Memphis to the rest of the state.

The importance of the Clarksville project lay in its strategic location almost directly between Paris and Bowling Green, the most feasible connection to the L & N. That fact alone rendered the connection alternative more attractive to most of the parties involved even though both Tennessee companies publicly professed their intention