In 1920 my grandmother was born into what was luxury for her time. Her father was a doctor and his family had various interests throughout the county in which she grew up. Despite living in that rural part of the South Carolina low country, her home was equipped with things that were as uncommon then as they are taken for granted today. It had running water fed by a spring and electric lighting powered by a generator kept in the small stone “powerhouse” at the rear of the property. I remember seeing it’s ruins when I was a small boy, confused by the idea that electricity could come from anywhere other than a power line.
Despite the rare wealth of her youth my grandmother was twelve years old before she ever saw an automobile. From the few times she told me the story it was clear that the experience left quite an impression on her, but not nearly so much as the trains of her day did. An illness took her father when she was a little girl, and by the time she entered college the Great Depression had taken what was left of his land and fortune. She didn’t complain very often about either of those losses, but whenever we rode back to her ancestral home together she lamented the disappearance of the railroads. She used words like “marvelous” and “grand” to describe what the trains and train stations were like in the travels of her youth.
Yesterday I finally got a sense for what she must have experienced. It was a cold gray February day. Not much fun to do anything outside, and not many options for diversion downtown with all of the traffic disruption on the 75/85 connector. Still, we wanted to get out of the house and do something we had not done recently. So it was that my parents, daughter and I found ourselves doing something that we’d never done before – visit the Southeastern Railway Museum in Duluth, Georgia. It’s hard to give a sense of what it is like to visit there. It’s one of those things that you almost have to see to appreciate.
The Savannah & Atlanta 750.
One of the trains in renovation there was the Superb, used to transport Woodrow Wilson on occasion and Warren Harding on a cross-country tour in the last days of his Presidency and his life. Think of the Superb as the Air Force One of the Roaring 20′s. Most of the spaces inside reminded me of the close quarters in an airplane or, perhaps more appropriately, a modern cruise ship. While cramped, it was clear that they were luxurious in their time. It was the same for some of the other train cars there at the museum, the ones that might have carried passengers more like my grandmother and less like a head of state.
Harding’s sitting room in his private car on the Superb.
There were other antiquities there too – rail cars that were rolling post offices, rail cars refrigerated with block ice for transporting fruit cross-continent, rail cars used to house workers during weeks away from home while they worked on the rail road. There were countless other relics big and small of a vast and vanished transportation infrastructure which most of us today have no idea even existed.
I often wonder what mysteries of my youth that I’ll struggle to explain to my daughter as she gets older and then to her children some day. Staring at the Iron Horses of a bygone era it was hard to grasp which of the “grand” and “marvelous” things in our present lives might make that list.
