A closely watched train

The Atlantic Coast Line steam engine 1031 of the Virginia & Carolina Southern Railroad passes in front of Henry Melvin’s General Merchandise in Dublin, NC, (ca. 1952) on its way from Elizabethtown to St. Pauls. This closely watched train passed through my father’s farm, marking my days and instilling in me a lifelong love of trains.

I recall standing barefoot beside the tracks listening to the iron beast’s distant rumblings and insistent chugging as it slowly approached. Metal scraped against metal, dilapidated cars rocked from side to side, and gray smoke billowed from its smokestack. The engineer, accustomed to seeing me by the track, blew the whistle, a piercing shriek, while I waved my thanks.

Because steam locomotives excite the senses of sight, hearing, and smell, their impact is powerful and leaves an indelible memory. My first flickering memory is of being outside around dark, hearing the train and watching it pass across the field, down by the edge of the woods.

The locomotive lumbered through the farm six days per week on its way from St. Pauls to Elizabethtown and back (54 miles roundtrip) from January 1911 to December 1958. It passed through eight communities along the way: St. Pauls, Dundee, Tobermory, Duart, Tar Heel, Perth, Dublin, and Elizabethtown.

The community names, other than St. Pauls and Elizabethtown, are Scottish and Irish in origin. Dundee is a Scottish name, and four of these communities—Tobermory, Duart, Perth, and Dublin are Irish. How they got these names has not been recorded, but the names reflect the family origin of many of the county’s settlers.

The train transported goods from Elizabethtown and the other community depots along the way to St. Pauls, where the freight was unloaded and sent on its way on another train or truck to its intended destination. The freight carried on the St. Pauls to Elizabethtown haul was made up of all kinds of manufactured goods ordered by families and stores in Elizabethtown and communities along the way. Elizabethtown Depot was located at 305 Swanzy, now a vacant lot.

The freight shipped from Elizabethtown Depot was varied and included lumber, cotton, horses and mules, and a variety of in-season agricultural products. Mrs. R.C. “Flonnie” Lewis, Dublin Depot agent from 1924 until it closed just before WW II, was quoted in an article by Nash Odum published in The Bladen Journal, April 26, 1973: “The most popular products shipped from Dublin Depot were peppers and watermelon, cotton, and lumber.”

Mr. Odum in the same article tells of the importance of the train for business and industry: “The railroad did much to awaken the business and industrial life of Bladen County. Until that time, Elizabethtown had water transportation via the Cape Fear River and truck service over unimproved highways (the roads until around 1930 were sandy clay, which was dry and dusty with potholes in summer, and muddy ruts in winter). Nothing meant more to the building of Elizabethtown than the building of that railroad, which gave the town adequate railroad shipping service.”

In a letter to Mr. Odum by Aniese Cromartie, May 13, 1973, on file in Bladen County Public Library’s Wanda Campbell Room, Ms. Cromartie writes, “The railroad started Elizabethtown to growing. When the government wanted materials brought in to build Lock and Dam No. 2, the railroad was extended to the Cape Fear River. The first paved streets were paved with rock and other materials hauled in on the train. Automobiles, also, were brought into Elizabethtown on open freight cars.”

Aniese Cromartie grew up at Berwick, a settlement along the tracks just west of Elizabethtown, and at the time home to the largest sawmill in North Carolina. As a young girl, Aniese stood on a barnyard fence, ignoring her mother’s disapproval, and watched the building of the railroad by convicts wearing striped uniforms.

Ms. Cromartie writes in the same letter: “A number of the young ladies of the county dated the Civil Engineers who worked with the railroad. Two of these ladies soon married. Mary McDowell married Neill G. Wade, and Mary Eliza Robeson married Pat Myers.”

When train service opened in 1911, a passenger car was included. Not only could passengers board and disembark the train at the designated depots, but there were also other places along the track they could get on and off. In the Knoxville neighborhood, named after a local pre-Civil War academy, which stood a couple of miles east of Dublin, passengers stood on a dirt lane—now called Knoxville Lane— and flagged the train; the train stopped, the passengers boarded, and the train took them down the track to their destination. The passenger tariff of 1920 lists fares from town to town. From Elizabethtown to St. Pauls, the fare was .84 cents one way; from Dublin to Elizabethtown, a mere .24 cents.

Many “special” passenger trains departed from Elizabethtown: An announcement in The Robesonian, Oct. 20, 1921: “The Virginia & Carolina Southern will operate a special train, Elizabethtown to Fayetteville on October 27th on account of the Cape Fear Fair … the train will leave Elizabethtown at 9 a. m., make connection with the regular train at St. Pauls … arriving at Fayetteville 11:45 a.m.” Other special trains ran to carry passengers from the western part of the county to graduation ceremonies in Elizabethtown and other events of county interest.

Families who lived along the track sometimes relied on the train to deliver emergency goods. In 1920, my Uncle John A. and Aunt Lois McDowell’s baby was afflicted with Malaria fever. The family, desperate to bring the child’s fever down, appealed to the engineer to deliver a block of ice. The next morning the ice was delivered to the frantic parents, the infant’s fever arrested, and the baby, named Vivian McDowell, grew up to work as a librarian in Bladen County schools and to write articles on local history.

The train, a familiar everyday sight, was a comforting presence in the minds of those who lived or worked in sight of it. They watched for the train. “Has the train passed?” was a recurrent question when they wanted to know the approximate time of day. Sometimes the train was delayed and was late in its schedule.

When I was ten years old, I recall walking down the tracks through the woods along about dark to take a look at an area where timber had been cut. From far down the track I was surprised to see the light of the train rounding the curve. Never had the train been this late in its afternoon schedule. Alone in the semidarkness, I was spooked, so I stood off the track, half hidden by underbrush, and timidly watched the train as it stole through the early twilight revealing all of its monstrous power and mystery to my overly fertile imagination.

Local people often used the track as a shortcut to visit friends and kin. In the summer, poor farm laborers had to walk the track to the farm of their day’s employment, since they had no other way of transportation. Tramps, too, used the track. It wasn’t unusual for tramps to approach a farmhouse and ask for food. The railroad tramps were not feared, but regarded with mild suspicion.

One summer morning while playing near the track, I saw a tramp sitting on the floor just inside the door of an empty freight car, his legs dangling outside the door as the train crept by. He was singing “Birmingham Jail,” a song I had heard on the radio and knew the words to: “Down in the valley, the valley so low, late in the evenin’, hear the train blow, write me a letter, send it by mail, send it in care of Birmingham Jail.”

In early spring, especially in a dry spring, the train would sometimes set our woods on fire when lighted cinders fell out of the ashpan below the firebox and onto the dry grass between the rails. The family would have to beat out the fire with pine limbs drenched in pond water.

After the train’s last run, 65 years ago, the rails and crossties were taken up and the land reverted to its original owners. The spikes were left behind, and I, already an avid train buff, collected as many as I could find and stored them under a shed. The train that we had watched ever so closely all of our lives suddenly disappeared. In the days that followed we missed it terribly, for its twice-per-day passing kept time with the steady rhythm of our simple everyday lives.

Now only ghostly traces of the railroad remain in a few fields or woodlands. You would never know a railroad track had been there. A bygone world of transportation is hidden in plain sight. Not a whisper remains of the steam locomotive, once a commanding and spectacular moving presence. The train, along with the terrain it rolled through, is a vanished world. Most of the people who remember the train are no longer living. They, too, have vanished.