Riding the Rails in Old Virginia

Manassas Train Site (Source: Prince William County Website)

I grew up in a railroad town. At my grandparent’s house, I slept on the narrow cot that had been my father’s in the upstairs sleeping porch.  The enormous old maple tree by the alley released hundreds of seedpods that helicoptered slowly past the windows down to the lawn, and at night the limbs threw fantastic shadows over the walls.  The vibration of the trains gently shook the bed and echoed through the old wallboards. The long train whistles provided the soundtrack of my childhood.

My father was born in that Victorian house near the tracks. He was the son of a man who made his living on the train.  The railroad provided an oasis of stability, keeping the big frame house full of children safe through the darkest days of the Great Depression.  Later, during World War II, the job and the house sheltered the extended family, including young cousins who were refugees from the bombing of London.

In their heyday, the railroads employed tens of thousands of American men; laborers, engineers, designers, and operators. The trains efficiently moved people, freight, and livestock across vast geographical spaces and rugged terrains. You could mail a letter in Washington for delivery in Culpeper or Danville the same day. My great grandfather could load chickens early in the morning in Luray, which arrived in Baltimore that afternoon, and were on the table for someone's supper the next night. My grandmother recalled the challenges of housekeeping in the era of coal fired trains, when the entire town would be coated with a fine black blanket of coal soot.

The other side of the tracks through the window

In the nineteenth century train schedules resulted in a new concept of time. At one point in American history there were more than five hundred different time zones across the country. The railroads abolished this provincial approach. Instead of the casual reckoning of the farmer gauging the sun, men set their pocket watches to the newly standardized Eastern, Central, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific Time Zones established by the railroad companies. Across the nation, Americans became accustomed to living and working on railroad time.

The old Southern Railway was established in 1894 from dozens of tiny former lines including the old Richmond to Danville tracks, which my Grandfather would later travel on nightly from Manassas, and which had carried Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet when they fled Richmond on the eve of the fall of the Confederacy. Known as the “First Railroad War”, towns with stations like Fredericksburg, Bristow Station, and of course, Bull Run (First and Second Manassas) became key battlefields.

                                                                             

Manassas Junction had been established shortly before the war as a stop on the old Manassas Gap Railroad. The trains that rolled through Manassas throughout the days of my youth were Southern Railway. When I was young in the 1960’s my father would drive me to the train depot and raise the signal flag. Taking a trip on the old Southern Railway cars required that you cross between them as the tracks yawned below the clanking connectors. On my first trip alone I was too unnerved to return to my seat after dinner. I set up all night in the dining car, complete with white linen table cloths and china, watching old men play poker while courteous white coated porters refilled their clinking glasses. At times, the train crawled so slowly down the track that I watched the cows in the fields saunter by at a brisker pace.

All of this recently came to mind because I had the pleasure of an unexpected train trip. When my car broke down in June, the day before the American Library Association Conference in D.C., I bought a ticket for an economical $38.00 and caught the train from Newport News to Fredericksburg. I must confess that I enjoy the modern era of train travel.

Rail travel with Amtrak is far more efficient, although minus the linen, the china and the patina. The chairs are comfortable and roomy, and the windows large. Once past Newport News we roll by the historic Lee’s Hall Station, which was last renovated for Reagan’s Victory journey by rail to Washington, D.C. The next stop is the tidy, picturesque Williamsburg Station.

Past Williamsburg, the trains follows a scenic passage through the countryside near the James. Glimpses of Virginia’s past still slowly scroll by like an old motion picture; scenes of old wooden train depots, swamps with gnarled cypress, eerily still herons, curtains of kudzu, and narrow country lanes flanked by high summer corn.

Kudzu shrouded landscape seen through the window

Eventually, the train enters the old part of Richmond and I see Main Street Station, and the familiar outline of Church Hill where firebrand Patrick Henry delivered his famed “Liberty or Death!” speech.

All of the old brick factories and warehouse of downtown Richmond pass by, their faded original signs now part of the chic retro look of fashionable condos.  Then the newly reopened Main Street Station, that venerable Richmond landmark with its great clock facing the Interstate, the site of thousands of arrivals and departures.    

Main Street Station,  Richmond

My husband remembers his grandmother taking the train from the Peninsula to Richmond to shop on Broad Street at Miller & Rhodes, a fashion mecca for generations of Virginia women. I feel certain that she was wearing gloves and a hat for the trip. Mention the famed Miller & Rhodes Tea Room and any woman over fifty who called eastern Virginia home from the 1940’s to the 1960’s sighs nostalgically. 

I remember going with my mother as a child, taking the elevator up to the top floor, the event of dainty tea sandwiches and chocolate silk pie complete with fine piano music.  Last year, the Virginia State Library actually had a tribute Miller & Rhodes Tea Room Party and Fashion Show, with many attendees wearing original millinery confections and outfits purchased from the store over several decades, and dining on the tea room’s once signature dishes.

Old warehouses renovated into condos

Looking out the train window I see scenes of my past life sliding by with the views.  Past Shockoe Bottom are the silhouettes of old Hollywood Cemetery high above the James River, a veritable Who’s Who of Virginia.  The winding hillside trails of Hollywood Cemetery (a National Historic Register Site) are the final resting place of two United States Presidents, James Monroe and John Tyler.

The famous 1849 cemetery is also the resting place of Confederate States President Jefferson Davis, twenty-five Confederate generals including J.E.B. Stuart and George Pickett, and more than eighteen thousand enlisted Confederate soldiers. They are joined by historian Douglas Southall Freeman, Matthew Fontaine Maury, "Pathfinder of the Seas”, Pulitzer Prize winning Virginia author Ellen Glasgow, poets,  patriots, and supreme court justices; a ninety foot tall granite pyramid, angels, monumental old Magnolias and, of course, ancient holly trees. 

In my childhood it was the scene of family picnics on Sunday afternoons, spent wandering through the Gothic park-like grounds learning history with a deviled egg, sepulchral art with a fried chicken leg, and horticulture with a cupcake.

Old Richmond passing by

Once past Richmond, the train enters the town of Ashland, which is neatly bisected by the tracks straight down the middle of the main street, appropriately named Railroad Avenue.  If you are strolling around the town there are little pedestrian cross bridges at each block over the tracks.  Ashland was established in the 1840’s by the railroad as a mineral springs resort, and each side of the track is lined with shops and charming old homes, including the Henry Clay Inn by the railroad station, and Randolph Macon College.

There is Ashland Coffee and Tea with live evening music, and some fine eating establishments including the Iron Horse for dinner, and Homemades by Suzanne for lunch fare (warning, they close early) featuring a wide range of freshly prepared Southern dishes such as crab cakes, country ham salad, and chocolate chess pie in the Railroad Side Cafe.

Once I was dining with my friend Alison in the café and she relayed a story about a local man.  During WWII he was on a troop train bound for Norfolk and the European front.  As the train rumbled slowly through his hometown of Ashland he leaned out of the window and tossed his boot, stuffed with a letter, into his own front yard.  Presumably, he was reissued a replacement before the Belgium winter.

Old house in Ashland seen through the train window

Leaving Ashland, the train rolls through still rural Caroline County passing right by the Stonewall Jackson Shrine operated by the National Park Service. “Stonewall” actually died at the Shrine, in the former small office of Fairfield Plantation in Guinea Station.  A commander chose this location to bring the wounded general because of the plantation’s proximity to the Richmond railroad. Jackson died from pneumonia ten days after arriving.  His final words were recorded by the attending physician. “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Sunset near Guinea Station

A friend of mine recently pointed out caustically that only in the South would the death site of a rebel general be maintained by the United States National Park System, and be called a “shrine”.  Touché.

Nearing Fredericksburg where I will spend the night with my mother, we pass a battlefield with another stone pyramid monument, built to memorialize some of the twenty thousand men that died in that horrendous slaughter of Union troops known as the First Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862.  Strangely, the evening after the battle, when countless men lay dead and dying on the frozen field below Mary’s Heights, the sky was lit in a rare and spectacular display of  Northern Lights.

Looking Up Caroline Street,  Fredericksburg Train Station                              

Railroads also figured prominently in the African American experience.  Southern tracks were laid primarily by enslaved and freed people working side by side.  When the Union troops camped outside of Fredericksburg in the spring and summer of 1862, the word spread to towns and plantations in the counties south of town. Up to an estimated ten thousand enslaved people seized their destiny, and begin walking to Fredericksburg on the trails and roads from Caroline, Louisa, Spotsylvania, and Orange.

In a dramatic and massive exodus to freedom they crossed the Rappahannock to the Union Camps and a new life.  Writing in the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star on February 25, 2006, historian John Hennessey reported that: “The Union army shepherded them northward along the line of the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad (some of them walking, some riding the cars) to Aquia Landing. There, virtually every day all summer, steamboats carried loads of freed people to Washington.  If ever a dot on America's map warranted the label "gateway to freedom," it would be Fredericksburg during the spring and summer of 1862. "

Double-decker VRE train pulls into station                       

Potomac River

A hundred and forty-eight years later I embark on those same tracks in Fredericksburg on the early Virginia Railway Express commuter train after spending the night with my mother. The train is a double-decker, and I position myself upstairs on the right to watch the scenery. The journey between Fredericksburg and Washington follows the Potomac and offers several beautiful vistas of the river glittering in the morning light. I notice that the Town of Quantico has been transformed from a sleepy small town into a bustling sprawling military hub over the past few years.

Brooke Station, Stafford                                             

We stop in Brooke, Lorton, Quantico, Alexandria, and then finally roll into the elegant Union Station, resplendent with a grand gold coffered ceiling and classical sculptures gazing serenely down into the pleasantly chaotic scene. The station is a destination worthy of lingering with cafes, shops, and even an outdoor market, but I have a quick croissant and coffee, and board the subway. I feel thoughtful and exhilarated from the hundred and eighty mile journey spanning centuries, life times, wars, and quite a lot of lovely countryside.

Passerby