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Shop the new spring collection at 20% off $75 or more with code iHeart20. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your stories. Send them to ouramericanstories.com. They're some of our favorites.
Up next. A story from the Atlanta History Center, a great museum where you can see exhibits like the massive Cyclorama painting and a locomotive with a truly unique story, the Texas. Built four years before Lincoln was elected, the locomotive is best known today as the principal pursuit engine in the great locomotive chase. which occurred after Union spies stole her running mate, the general. But the story goes far deeper than that.
Here's Jackson McQuigg. Vice President of Properties at the Atlanta History Center with a story. I want to say I was born into it, but I have been a fan of railroads and interested in railroads pretty much all my life. That's something that I shared with my dad. And growing up in Tampa, Florida, with deep roots in Atlanta, Atlanta's history was always of interest to me.
And I think that, you know, by the age of like 14, I was volunteering at the Florida Railroad Museum, scraping paint and doing all the things that older people didn't want to do, you know. And I've just always been fascinated by trains. I mean, it is just absolutely one of the most fascinating technologies. And I think I'm interested in it because, you know, travel is such a fun thing. And there's no better way to go than traveling by train.
You can visit with friends and have a drink, have a meal, look out the window, you can get on a sleeping car and see the world go by overnight. I just think there's nothing better. Mm-hmm. Atlanta is Very, very new by comparison to many cities. Savannah, Is a century older than Atlanta.
Atlanta is only about the same age as Los Angeles. I mean, it's a very new city.
So, when a surveyor for the Western and Atlantic Railroad drove a stake in the ground, a wooden surveyor stake, Might about where uh State Farm Arena is today. Atlanta didn't exist, and Atlanta gradually became a railroad hub. One of the nicknames for Atlanta, in fact, is the Chicago of the South.
So the locomotive Texas It's only one of two locomotives left from the Western Atlantic, the very railroad that Atlanta owes its existence to. If you think about that for a second, the tangible links to the city's past are really few. Atlanta's a city that likes to redevelop itself over time. Sherman burned it, it also suffered a cataclysmic fire, and development has really changed the way Atlanta has looked time and time again. But this locomotive, like its sister, the General, date back to the 1850s.
This is unusual for Atlanta. My boss likes to say they're the Romulus and Remus of Atlanta. I think that's a great sound bite, and he's almost right. But the locomotive was one of the two participants in the great locomotive chase. which is a Civil War incident of some note and certainly a lot of coverage.
The chase involved three different locomotives, a pole car running two miles, and you name it. It's really an interesting story. Yeah. During 1862, April of 1862 as a matter of fact, there were a group of Union spies that had made it behind Confederate lines and the effort was to disrupt the Western Atlantic Railroad in order to ultimately take Nashville. And if you could cut Nashville off from the rest of the South and Chattanooga as well.
you would hurt. The Confederacy.
So they made it behind the lines of the Confederates. dressed in civilian clothes, got on a train in Atlanta. When the train got to what was called Big Shanty, in those days everybody got off the train. to go eat and in that case breakfast. There was no club card, Bloody Marys and stuff in at that point.
So they're the last ones left on the train. Everybody's eating breakfast at the Lacey Hotel. And that gave them their opportunity to steal the locomotive general. and head north. and it was to get far ahead.
Tear up track, disrupt telegraph lines, and really put a severe crimp into the Confederacy's war efforts. But what they didn't count on was that the crew of the general decided to give chase to these guys. and try to catch the general locomotive as it was going up the line. The pursuers, Captain William Fuller and others, wound up finding the Texas, found that it. You know, it had a good head of steam and it had enough fuel that it could be run to chase after the general.
They decided, well, heck. Average track speed's 15 miles an hour. Let's do 50. Let's do it in reverse. Let's do it on track that wouldn't be a good industrial siding by today's standards.
This is just really rudimentary railroading at that stage. It must have been a frightening ride. I'm really glad that I wasn't on it. It reflects the lack of caution that only you know somebody who's pretty youthful can do and pretty motivated by adrenaline i would argue Finally, The pursuers wound up catching the Raiders led by James J. Andrews.
So they were known as Andrews Raiders.
Sounds like a 60s band, but there you have it.
So, but they caught them, captured them.
Some were hanged, including Andrews, who was hanged here in Atlanta. And the pursuers were celebrated as folk heroes at the time because that was one where the South One, one. And so, as a result, it became the famous locomotive that caught up to the general and achieved a degree of fame just because it was the one that won the chase, so to speak. And you've been listening to Jackson McQuig telling stories about the thing he loves most. And so many Americans do.
Always, this country has been fascinated with train travel. When we come back, more of Jackson's stories. and more about trains and the great locomotive chase here. on our American stories. Mm.
Lee Habib here, and I'm inviting you to help OurAmerican Stories celebrate this country's 250th birthday, only a short time away. If you want to help inspire countless others to love America like we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here to millions for years to come, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OwlAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Any amount helps.
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On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks.
Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member Finra and SIPC.
Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com. com slash disclosures.
Uh Ready to feel healthier this year? Find everything you need at losesweightnow.co. Orderly Meds gives you access to proven GLP-1 medications at a lower cost, backed by real medical professionals. And yes, they ship in discreet, private packaging because it's nobody's business how you're improving yourself. And your journey deserves dignity, privacy, and confidence.
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It's Coldwater Creek, the mark of exceptional workmanship and signature touches inspired by a mountain west heritage. Distinctive styles created from quality fabrics, silhouettes perfected with just the right drape, feel-good fits offering ease of movement, and thoughtful details to elevate your look. For a wardrobe you can count on season after season, visit ColdwaterCreek.com. Shop the new spring collection at 20% off $75 or more with code iHeart20. And we return to our American stories and the story of Locomotive Texas.
When we last left off, Jackson McQuigg was telling us about the famous great locomotive chase. During the Civil War, which the Texas participated in as the main pursuit locomotive. But there's a lot more to this story. Then just that. Here again is Jackson.
with the rest of the story. After the Great Locomotive Chase, it wound up in Virginia because there was a salt mine up there. Of course, at the time, before refrigeration, salt was the way you preserved food. It was actually captured and briefly used by the U.S. Military Railroad for a brief time before it was sent back to Atlanta.
The Texas very nearly wound up being cut up for scrap a number of times and it certainly was very nearly abandoned in many cases. Unlike the General, which is the other locomotive that participated in the Great Locomotive Chase, which was preserved in the. It was preserved in the 1880s. It was...
sort of the one that was seen as the one that needed to be preserved. It was a worn-out locomotive by 1900, really by the late 1890s. And historian Mark Brainerd of Chattanooga found that there was this fellow who was the master mechanic. In other words, the guy in charge of the roundhouse here in Atlanta for the Western N Atlantic and later for the NCN St. L, which absorbed the Western N Atlantic.
and he knew about the history of the Texas. There wasn't a lot of interest in preserving it. But he kind of made sure that it never wound up on the retirement roster, that he kept it. hit out and busy and I'm sure he'd been told to get rid of the old thing many times, but he kept it as a pet. I mean, you know, this is the equivalent of.
of trying to keep a 1940 automobile kicking around with your 2021 Tesla. There's no logical reason why the the the locomotive should still be on the roster of the NC Instein L in 1900, but yet it was. But We wound up in a scenario with that engine, WeS Atlantins, where it was again looking like it would be scrapped again. And a fellow by the name of Wilbur Kurtz, later to become known as the technical advisor, Gone with the Wind, an interesting character all the way around, a man who was pretty much consumed with this great locomotive chase to the point where he married the daughter of one of the southern pursuers. Kind of weird, isn't it?
He began a campaign that actually resulted in the saving of the Texas. And when I say campaign, I mean letters to the editor, a grassroots effort to get the locomotive preserved, in part because the general had been preserved. The Civil War Veterans Group, the Grand Army of the Republic, Union soldiers, had helped to see that it got preserved, but the Texas had no such love.
So one of the Hearst newspapers here in Atlanta called the Atlanta Georgian, it began a campaign right alongside Wilbur Kurtz. It encouraged people to, Atlantis to send in their newspapers. Nickel and dime contributions to help preserve the Texas. Again, all this time it's sitting at the railroad yard waiting to get scrapped, you know. And that effort, while it created a lot of interest, was not successful at first.
So Lo and behold, the locomotive owes its very preservation not to that effort.
Well that helped. but by a group of women who got together and found great interest in saving the locomotive. They called themselves the Ladies of Atlanta. And it was an ad hoc group who effectively went to the president of the NC and St. L Railway and said, you're going to give us this locomotive and we're going to give it to the city of Atlanta.
And we're going to preserve it. And of course. How could he disagree with the ladies of Atlanta? He agreed in. the the locomotive was saved.
It took six years to get it to Grant Park where it was finally put under a shed on display in the park. but at least it's at the park, right? In 1927, the locomotive was actually put into the same building as the Cyclorama in Grant Park. We moved the locomotive in 2015. And it had been there so long, it was literally in a basement level behind a 1970s constructed theater where you saw the photo or the intro film about what the cyclorama was.
So we had to extricate the locomotive. out of that building. By running it through a movie theater, which I think is a first. Oh, and the movie theater was underground, so we had to dig down to get to it. It was a.
truly fun, bizarre day. Mm. Yeah. When we took the locomotive out of Grant Park and out of the old Cyclorama building, put it on a truck. shipped it up to the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer, where I Used to work.
We really got into seeing what was there. We found out that. There wasn't a lot of original Texas there. The tender was from a different locomotive. The frame was only half from the original Texas.
The cab was different, the boiler was different, the wheels were different, the cylinders were different. And in fact, The bell was different. You name it, and it was from another locomotive, or it had been fabbed.
So, what did we have here?
Well, we found out that the stand, the frame that actually holds the bell onto the locomotive, that was from the original Texas. But We kind of felt liberated to tell other stories about the locomotive's history. And since the great locomotive chase story is told in so many places, We wanted to tell the broader context about railroads and being developers, railroads being city shapers, railroads being our life's blood here in Atlanta to this day. By the way, the decision that we made after determining that the uh Texas It contained a lot of parts from engines that weren't to Texas. We decided to paint it in its 1886 colors and that was indeed controversial.
One of my friends, who I knew would react poorly to the decision. Saw a picture on Facebook of the engine just after it had gotten painted at the Museum in North Carolina. Mm. And tagged me in a post and said I had a lot of explaining to do. In fact, this friend of mine accused me of ruining his childhood.
And that's a direct quote. And to which my response was, well, well, that must have... Been a pretty bad childhood, you know. I mean it's That was the most significant thing that occurred in it. But, you know, what we say to folks that are maybe.
A little concerned that it doesn't look like it did during its Civil War years and doesn't have the paint that was on it, it's just paint. There were three pursuing locomotives in the great locomotive chase, and the other two are razor plates now. They're gone. The Texas got through by this gun and its teeth. And at various points, like we've been discussing, it has been all but forgotten.
Through 2015, it was behind glass panels. It was this. Look, don't touch. artifact you couldn't go in the cab. You really didn't get to understand too much about its history, it was just this.
forgotten locomotive. It uh it was just hard to relate to. And, you know, I'm a museum guy and museum folks Well, they're just really into light. having visitors come and stand at a distance sometimes from the objects. But, you know, the Texas is a durable object.
and part of the experience of it is to actually get in the cab and see what it was like. to be at the throttle of that little little by today's standards locomotive. And I think People really understand history more when they interact with it physically. And the fact that you can do that with a locomotive that was built in 1856, I think is just kind of fun. was waiting for y'all.
There were a couple of families that came through and they all went in the cab of the locomotive. Every one of them went into the cab. I think that's neat. They just had the ability to stand where history had taken place. And that's you.
And no doubt, indeed, it's huge when people can interact. with their nation's history, And a special thanks to Monty for Producing that piece and bumping into that story in his travels around the country with Robbie. The two did a road trip together, and that's where we discovered Jackson McQuig. and he is the Vice President of Properties at the Atlanta History Center. Where they are keeping alive stories about this great southern city.
Jackson McQuigg's story of the locomotive, Texas. here on Our American Stories. Uh At CVS, it matters that we're not just in your community, but that we're part of it. It matters that we're here for you when you need us, day or night. And we want everyone to feel welcomed and rewarded.
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You see it instantly. It's Coldwater Creek, the mark of exceptional workmanship and signature touches inspired by a Mountain West heritage, distinctive styles created from quality fabrics, silhouettes perfected with just the right drape, feel-good fits offering ease of movement, and thoughtful details to elevate your look. For a wardrobe you can count on season after season, visit ColdwaterCreek.com. Shop the new spring collection at 20% off $75 or more with code iHeart20. Ready to feel healthy this year?
Find everything you need at losesweightnow.co. Orderly Meds gives you access to proven GLP1 medications at a lower cost, backed by real medical professionals. And yes, they ship in discreet private packaging because it's nobody's business how you're improving yourself. And your journey deserves dignity, privacy, and confidence. Get started today at losweightnow.co.
Individual results may vary. Visit loseweightnow.co and get started today. That's loseweightnow.co. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.
Mm-hmm.
