Steam locomotives

Charleston’s Best Friend: A Freemason Provides an Intimate Look into the Development of the American Railway System

The Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library's collection of correspondence from Moses Holbrook (1783-1844) to John James Joseph Gourgas (1777-1865) provides researchers with a wealth of insight into early nineteenth-century American Freemasonry, as well as an intimate look at daily life in Charleston, South Carolina, as seen through Holbrook's eyes. During the 1820s and 1830s, Holbrook, the Southern Jurisdiction's fourth Sovereign Grand Commander, corresponded with the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction’s John James Joseph Gourgas. Gourgas served as the NMJ's Grand Secretary General from its founding in 1813 until 1832, and then as Sovereign Grand Commander from 1832 until 1851. Holbrook served as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction’s Supreme Council from 1826 until 1844. Holbrook’s letters touch upon a variety of subjects, from outbreaks of yellow fever to the political victory of Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) in the Presidential election of 1828. However, one passage in particular stands out for its contribution to our understanding of transportation history: a passage in Holbrook’s January 1, 1831, letter to Gourgas regarding Charleston’s Best Friend, the first American-built passenger steam locomotive. Holbrook writes,

A2019_178_0060aDS1Letter from Moses Holbrook to John James Joseph Gourgas, 1831 January 1.

 

The only subject of public attention that occupies us at present is the Rail Road and “Charleston’s Best Friend” (the name given to a little locomotive engine of six horse power that has been built for an experiment and put upon the small portion – about five miles or a little over – of the Rail Road which has been completed for the purpose of trial.) The “Best Friend” when on the trial by the Rail Road Company’s Committee to ascertain whether the machinery - &c - answered the contract which Mr. Miller the inventor had entered into. The “Best Friend” dragged after it near ten tons besides itself and the wood and water necessary – at the rate of about 15 miles an hour with perfect ease and safety. Several pleasure cars are now attached to it and it runs at stated periods of the day to carry passengers only – and Bachelors, Maids, Matrons & Madams all are anxious to make trial of a ride at the speed of about 20 miles an hour. I tried it the other day and went the five miles and back again in thirty minutes and this time included the turning about taking in water &c. 

I remain respectfully your friend and well wisher,

M. Holbrook

Built at the West Point Foundry in New York in 1830, Charleston’s Best Friend was hailed by the Charleston Courier as an experience that “annihilate[ed] time and space,” a technological achievement that demonstrated the potential of steam powered rail travel. Until this time, travel had been limited by road conditions, the weather, and river navigability. After the short, but great, success of Charleston’s Best Friend, which was destroyed by operator error six months after its maiden voyage, six new locomotives were constructed for the Southern Railway System, including the Phoenix, which was constructed from the remains of Charleston’s Best Friend.  Its short life had completely revolutionized America’s transportation system, and towns across the country shifted their sights from building canals to building railroads.

As for Sovereign Grand Commander Holbrook, ravaged by several illnesses, worn thin by the incessant battles with Anti-masonry and the “lukewarmness” of those within the Fraternity, William L. Fox in Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle reported Holbrook longed to leave Charleston and relinquish his responsibilities as Sovereign Grand Commander. When the United States Government offered settlers to Florida 160 acres of free land on condition they defend it against the Seminoles, Holbrook applied for and received a plot of land under the auspices of the Armed Occupation Act on April 16, 1843, and settled in St. Lucie, Florida. Remembered as a recluse by the settlers, Holbrook lived in his one room, palm-thatched cabin stuffed with hundreds of books brought from Charleston, and served as the settlement’s only doctor. His “many misfortunes over the years” had robbed him of his “once brilliant intellect,” another settler William Henry Peck (1830-1892) remarked in one of his articles for the Florida Star regarding the Indian River settlement. His only solace was his books and a flute “on which he became a virtuoso.”

Best FriendCharleston's Best Friend: An image from Popular Science Monthly.

On September 11, 1844, Moses Holbrook died and was buried near his cabin on the bluff overlooking the Indian River. He was 61 years old.

 


Captions

Letter from Moses Holbrook to John James Joseph Gourgas, 1831 January 1. Records and Correspondence of the Supreme Council, Northern Masonic Jurisdiction. Collection of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library, SC 300.002.


The Order of Railway Conductors and American Freemasonry’s Influence upon Labor Unions

One of my favorite objects in the collection of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library is this minute book from the Order of Railway Conductors (ORC), Lincoln Division, No. 206. Besides being one of my first acquisitions as the newly appointed Archivist for the Museum and Library in October of 2014, my research for this object provided me with a new appreciation for the work performed by railway conductors and in the role that these men played in the development of fraternalism.

  Cover_2

Order of Railway Conductors Minute Book, Lincoln Division, No. 206, 1941-1960.
 

As I learned from this online exhibit by the National Museum of American History, the job of railroad conductor in the mid-nineteenth-century was much more difficult and important than I had originally imagined. In addition to collecting tickets, the conductor served as the train’s “captain.” He supervised the train’s crew and determined when a train “could safely depart” the station. He also was the person “in charge during emergencies,” such as train derailments. The conductor’s role was the equivalent of a ship’s captain in many ways, and many of the first men to become railway conductors in the “1830s had previously worked as steamboat or coastal packet captains.”

In addition to the many duties mentioned above, a conductor’s workday was extremely long, highly dangerous, and offered little pay, and it was in response to these hardships that the first “Conductors Union” was formed by a young twenty-two year old conductor, T.J. Wright, in the spring of 1868 at Amboy, Illinois. While Wright’s fledgling organization only lasted a few months, his idea to organize quickly spread across North America, and by November 1868 the Conductors Brotherhood, the original name of the Order of Railway Conductors, was formed in December 1868 at Columbus, Ohio. The new organization “was not a labor union,” in the conventional sense, however, but a “fraternal benefit and temperance society” organized upon Masonic principles as historian Paul Michel Taillon explains in his book, Good, Reliable, White Men: Railroad Brotherhoods, 1877-1917. The typical ORC Division or local lodge was modelled after the Masonic Blue Lodge: An “altar with a copy of the Bible on it stood at the center of the brotherhood lodge room. At the far end of the room sat the lodge master, at his ‘station,’ on a raised platform with a table and gavel.”

Scan_2015-12-11_19-05-15
Letter to the Members of Lincoln Division, 206, on the Passing of Brother Allton, February 1943.

While fraternal and beneficial features always remained strong throughout the history of the Order of Railway Conductors, events within and without the organization would change it in significant ways. In the year 1890, the old leadership was replaced, and a “more aggressive program of trade regulation was adopted.” Furthermore, ORC would adopt the strike clause, which had previously been forbidden and punishable by expulsion from the Order. Technological changes in the railway industry also had a great impact upon the Order, which were only delayed by the outbreak of World War II. The conversion to diesel locomotion after the war brought “greater operating efficiency,” a Life Magazine article reported in 1949, and with this operating efficiency came a reduced need for the many men (and trains) that kept America moving. Placed within its historical context, this minute book by Lincoln Division, No. 206, covering the years 1941-1960, captures the postwar decline of the Order, which by 1969 had merged with the several small railway unions to form the United Transportation Union.



Captions

Order of Railway Conductors Minute Book, Lincoln Division, No. 206, 1941-1960. Museum Purchase. Collection of the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library, FR 200.001.

References

Ehrlich, Leslie, and Bob Russell. “Employment Security and Job Loss: Lessons from Canada's National Railways, 1956-1995.” Labour/Le Travail 51 (Spring 2003): 115-152. 

“Locomotive Graveyard” (1946). Life, December 5. https://books.google.com/books?id=VkEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA155#v=onepage&q&f=false Accessed: 12 December 2015.

National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (no date). “Railroad Conductor.” America on the Move: Lives on the Railroad. http://amhistory.si.edu/onthemove/exhibition/exhibition_9_5.html Accessed: 12 December 2015.

Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen (1968). O.R.C & B., 1868-1968: Serving the Man on the Road for 100 Years. Cedar Rapid, Iowa: Order of Railway Conductors and Brakemen.

Steward, Estelle M. (1936). Conductors of America, Order of Railway. In Handbook of American Trade-Unions, (pp. 253-256). Washington, D.C.: United States. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://books.google.com/books?id=iCGWrdBpT_8C&dq=%22order+of+railway+conductors%22&q=%22order+of+railway+conductors%22#v=onepage&q=%22Organized%20at%20mendota%22&f=false Accessed: 12 December 2015.

Taillon, Paul Michel (2009). Good, Reliable, White Men: Railroad Brotherhoods, 1877-1917. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.