Beck on Grant, _Rails through the Wiregrass: A History of the Georgia and Florida Railroad_

[eh.net-review at eh.net]

Published by EH.NET (April 2008)

H. Roger Grant, _Rails through the Wiregrass: A History of the 
Georgia and Florida Railroad_. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois 
University Press, 2006, xvi + 223 pp. $36 (cloth), ISBN 0-87580-365-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Bill Beck, Lakeside Writers' Group.


Earlier this year, the _Wall Street Journal_ featured a front-page 
article on the resurgence of the nation's rail system. The article 
reported that the nation's major railroads are in the midst of an 
aggressive program of building rail corridors from the West Coast to 
the Mexican Border and the Great Lakes, and from the Gulf Coast to 
New England. The program, estimated to cost upwards of $10 billion, 
is designed to accommodate the tremendous increase in container 
traffic to and from the nation's ports.

The rebound of the nation's freight rail system is little short of 
amazing, considering that just thirty years ago economists and 
pundits were predicting the imminent demise of the American railroad. 
But as history as demonstrated, the account of the nation's rail 
system's death was greatly exaggerated.

So it is refreshing, and somewhat wistful, to read H. Roger Grant's 
_Rails through the Wiregrass_. Grant, professor of history at Clemson 
University, has made a life's work out of chronicling the rise and 
fall of the nation's railroads, with books on the history of the 
Chicago & North Western, the Erie Lackawanna, the Wabash, and the 
Chicago Great Western Railways all to his credit.

Grant's _Rails through the Wiregrass_ is the workmanlike history of 
what contemporaries would call a short line, a rail system that ran 
through the piney woods of Georgia from Augusta on the Savannah River 
southwest to Madison, just across the state line in Florida's 
Panhandle. The Georgia & Florida was one of hundreds of short line 
railroads that were the result of merger and acquisition activity in 
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that combined 
smaller roads into a short line that was often eventually acquired by 
a larger regional line.

Organized in 1906 as an amalgamation of more than a half-dozen small 
short lines, including the Valdosta Southern, the Augusta & Florida, 
and the Sparks Western, the Georgia & Florida served wiregrass 
sawmill towns such as Sparks, Valdosta and Vidalia. Its perceived 
need was to tie the region more firmly to markets in Virginia and the 
Mid Atlantic states, and entrepreneurs saw the potential for vast new 
markets for Georgia agricultural commodities, such as tobacco, 
watermelons and onions, in the markets of the North.

Virginian John Skelton Williams had nearly a dozen years in forming 
and running railroads, including the mighty Seaboard Air Line, when 
he was ousted as the Seaboard's chairman in a 1903 proxy fight. Three 
years later, Williams assembled the Georgia & Florida and became its 
first president.

Williams and his Richmond and Baltimore investors expected that the 
wiregrass region of interior Georgia would become an agricultural and 
natural resources powerhouse. Those expectations never worked out, 
and the railroad was always undercapitalized with aging rolling 
stock. Even more debilitating to the Georgia & Florida's future was 
the road's lack of a northern terminus in Augusta for much of its 
history.

The disruptions caused by World War I dealt the Georgia & Florida a 
blow from which it never really recovered. The Georgia & Florida went 
into receivership in 1915, was almost dismembered during the 
agricultural depression of the early 1920s, was reorganized in 1925, 
expanded to South Carolina and went back into bankruptcy at the 
beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, three years after the 
death of its founder, John Skelton Williams.

The G&F -- what locals called "the Gone & Forgotten" -- operated in 
receivership for more than three decades. While in bankruptcy, the 
Georgia & Florida weathered the Depression and the Interstate Highway 
Act of 1956, prospered during World War II, converted to diesel 
locomotives and dropped passenger service. Grant tells the 
fascinating story of the G&F during the period against the backdrop 
of monumental change in the nation's rail industry during the middle 
years of the twentieth century.

Finally, in 1961, the Southern Railway entered talks to acquire the 
Georgia & Florida as a wholly-owned subsidiary. Southern had to up 
its offer to outbid the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, and it took 
more than two years for the federal bankruptcy courts and the ICC to 
approve the sale. The G&F name disappeared in 1971, and in 1982, when 
the Southern and the Norfolk & Western merged into the Norfolk 
Southern, much of the Georgia & Florida rail system was abandoned. A 
picture on page 186 of a scrub pine tree growing through an abandoned 
section of G&F main line is eloquent testimony of the fate of 
America's early twentieth century transportation legacy.

Grant has written a fascinating corporate history of a forgotten 
chapter in the South's economic history. He has mined contemporary 
sources well, most notably the business pages of the weekly and small 
daily newspapers of the Georgia wiregrass region that covered the G&F 
during its heyday. He has also made excellent use of corporate annual 
reports, minute books, trustee reports and the John Skelton Williams 
papers.

Rail buffs also will enjoy _Rails through the Wiregrass_. Grant 
includes several dozen photographs and maps, all of which will help 
introduce another generation of readers to the era of steam 
locomotives. He calls the G&F "a hard luck road," and notes that 
Southern roads have not enjoyed the same scrutiny from historians as 
have Northern roads. Let's hope that historians use Grant's history 
of the Georgia & Florida as a steppingstone to more top-flight 
historical accounts of Southern railroads.


Bill Beck is an Indianapolis-based independent corporate and 
institutional historian. His latest book is _Pride of the Inland 
Seas: An Illustrated History of the Port of Duluth-Superior_.

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