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Guide to Corporate Record Collection Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company SC
Guide to the Corporate Record Collection of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company at the Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society Inc Compiled by Margaret T Anderson Soft Cover Copyright 1997 38 pages includes photo
The Chesapeake & Ohio Historical Society is the largest organization devoted to the study and preservation of historical data and artifacts relating to a single railroad company. The Society was organized in 1969 and incorporated in 1975. It has published a monthly newsletter and later a magazine throughout its existence and beginning in 1980 has published a series of books of varying lengths on C&O subjects, about ten titles being in print at any one time. Although organized as an enthusiast group, the society has grown into a professional organization with facilities open to the public during normal business hours, staffed by professional employees.
In recognition of the Society's efforts, accomplished mainly through volunteer efforts, Hays T. Watkins, then Chairman of Chessie System Railroads, in 1982, directed that the company would enter into a contract with the C&OHS providing for the company to donate to the Society obsolete materials that might be of interest for preservation. In compliance with this, various files of the company and its predecessors were given to the Society. Those include Public Relations Department materials, huge quantities of technological material such as original engineering and mechanical drawings and files from the Engineering Offices, and some corporate records.
It is that later group of records, the corporate history materials, with which this guide deals. These records consist of the original manuscript minute books for 132 of the companies that were either merged into the C&O Railway, or were subsidiaries of that company, as well as some materials from the C&O itself, though the minutes from the C&O are copies. The actual original minute books of the C&O and its lineal predecessors are held by the Corporate Secretary of CSX Transportation, the company into which the C&O was merged in 1985. This is one of three known holdings of corporate records pertinent to the companies that make up the present-day CSX Transportation system, the others being at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, and as stated the Corporate Secretary of CSX Transportation in Jacksonville, Florida.
These records were stored in the C&O Headquarters building (The First National Bank Building) in Richmond, Virginia, until that office was closed in the early 1960s. Though the corporate offices were at that time removed entirely to Cleveland, Ohio, the predecessor corporate minutes were, for some reason transferred to the C&O offices in Huntington, West Virginia, and stored in what was known as the "Operating Headquarters Building" beginning about 1963. The "OH" Building contained various operating offices as well as the Chief Engineer and Mechanical Department. This arrangement lasted until Chessie System (of which C&O was a component beginning in 1972) was merged with Seaboard System to form CSX Transportation. As part of that reorganization the offices in Huntington were moved to Jacksonville, Florida, and the C&OHS was given a large amount of surplus materials from Huntington, including many engineering drawings, files, and mechanical data. The corporate minute books were taken into our custody at that time, and moved to Clifton Forge, Virginia, the Society's headquarters and archives location, where they were in dead storage until 1994.
Recognizing the need to professionalize the Society's intellectual collection operations, the board of directors applied to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for a grant to survey, arrange, catalog, and conserve the bulk of our collections. The initial, large-scope grant application was denied, and the Commission suggested a more focused application dealing just with the corporate records. This grant was approved in 1994, with a September 1995 completion date. The Commission supplied $65,000 and the Society matched this with a contribution of $34,300 toward the project. The completion date was extended to May 1996.
In connection with the grant two professional personnel positions were authorized: an archivist and an assistant. The Society filled these positions in September 1994, and work on the collection began. During the work the Society constructed a state-of-the-art archives facility on the second floor of its building at 312 E. Ridgeway Street in Clifton Forge, and installed the archives staff and collection there in January 1995. The collection is filed in this facility and available for use by researchers during the regular hours of the institution five days per week.
An important part of the work was microfilming the collection, which was accomplished by the Virginia State Archives and Library in Richmond, Virginia. A copy of the resultant film is retained at the Virginia Archives and an original and one copy are maintained at the C&OHS archives.
The first question often asked about our collections and work is why we devote such great effort and resources to a single company. Initially, it was because of the specific interests of the group of railroad enthusiasts and modelers that organized the society and were its earliest members. There are over 60 organizations of this type in America today, almost all in the enthusiast and volunteer field, as we were until 1987. As the C&OHS grew we decided to concentrate on the C&O, as always, but to use it as a paradigm for the American railway experience in the broader sense, and try to interpret this broader sweep of history using the C&O as the vehicle.
The C&O itself was one of America's great railroads in the 20th century, holding for many years the designation as the world's largest carrier of bituminous coal. The rich coal fields of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky were tapped beginning in 1873 and the high-quality metallurgical and steam coal that was extracted was a prime resource in the industrial development of America both in the Northeast and in the Mid-West. The C&O's earliest origin was the Louisa Railroad, a small line begun in central Virginia in 1836 to carry farm products to Richmond markets, and served its first decade essentially as a branch of the larger Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad which it joined at what is now Doswell, Virginia. The company renamed itself Virginia Central and began an ambitious expansion program in 1849 and by 1856 had reached the base of the Alleghanies (the local Virginia spelling is with an "a," not the more widely use "e"), at Jackson's River Station, near present-day Clifton Forge. At the same time the Commonwealth of Virginia had incorporated as a public corporation the Covington & Ohio Railroad that was to build from the Virginia Central terminus to the Ohio River across the western reaches or "Transmountaine" area of the state. Although work had been done on this line, the Civil War caused it to halt as the Transmountaine region broke and became West Virginia in 1863. The Virginia Central was a key logistical support to the Confederacy and at war's end was completely battle wrecked.
To revive the old notion of a "Great Connection" between Tidewater Virginia and coastwise and seagoing navigation and the interior of the continent, Virginia entrepreneurs tried to raise capital to build over the old Covington & Ohio line but finding none in the
South or in England they finally interested Collis P. Huntington, who as one of the "Big Four" was just completing the Central Pacific portion of the great Transcontinental Railroad. His vision was a railroad system operating from coast to coast under one company's control, his! To do this he took control of the Virginia Central in 1869 as the eastern link. The company was reorganized as the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad and began building west, reaching the Ohio River in January 1873. The hoped-for flow of commerce did not result, partly as a result of the Financial Panic of 1873, and because the C&O had no good railroad connections at the new city of Huntington on the Ohio near the mouth of Big Sandy River. River traffic was declining and transshipment from rail to water and again to rail was declining in favor of all rail routing, available on several lines north of the C&O.
As a result, the C&O went into receivership in 1875, emerging in 1878, reorganized as the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. Huntington was still in control, but spent most of his time building and buying new lines rather than developing and solidifying the C&O's traffic base and physical plant. But by 1886 he actually controlled lines that stretched from San Francisco to Newport News, the C&O being the eastern link. Only two years later the amalgamation came unglued and the C&O went into a second receivership, and emerged a year later without reorganization but under control of Vanderbilt interests. The Vanderbilts placed Melville E. Ingalls as president of the C&O. He was a trusted lieutenant and president of the Vanderbilt's "Big Four" system in the mid-west (part of the greater New York Central System). From 1889 to 1899 Ingalls held both posts, and with the help of George S. Stevens, as general manager, essentially rebuilt the C&O to highest standards with new bridges, tunnels, road-beds, rails, structures, rolling stock and locomotives.
At the same time the great coal fields that the C&O tapped began to increase their production exponentially, and by the turn of the 20th century C&O was one of the major carriers in the South and East (it had a genuinely dual-region orientation, rooted in old Virginia, but supplying its raw materials to the northeast and booming mid-west). In 1899 George Stevens became President as the Vanderbilts gave up their control to J.P. Morgan and the Pennsylvania Railroad. In the next 20 years the C&O was expanded and further upgraded, branches were built to obtain even more coal. By World War H the C&O was the pre-eminent carrier of bituminous coal, dumping huge quantities in coastwise shipping at its large yard and pier facility at Newport News, Virginia, on Hampton Roads, and carrying as much or more west to connections in Ohio to the Great Lakes shipping at Toledo.
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