Brief summaries of the history of the Norfolk and Western and Southern Railway systems will help explain how the records described below fit together. The Norfolk and Western Railroad was organized in 1881 from the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio Railroad, which had been sold to the Philadelphia investment banking firm of E.W.Clark and Company. The Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio, in turn, had been created in 1870 by the merger of three Virginia railroads with antebellum origins: the Norfolk and Petersburg (connecting these two cities), the Southside (running from Petersburg to Lynchburg), and the Virginia and Tennessee (running from Lynchburg to Bristol on the Tennessee border).
Primarily a line carrying agricultural products at its inception, the Norfolk and Western rapidly became associated with the mineral development of the southwestern part of Virginia and West Virginia. In mid-1881 it acquired the franchises to four other lines: the New River Railroad, the New River Railroad, Mining and Manufacturing Company, the Bluestone Railroad, and the East River Railroad. These became the basis for Norfolk and Western's New River Division, which ran to the coalfields to the west.
Much of the early history of the Norfolk and Western Railroad can be written in terms of expansion and consolidation with other lines. In 1890, it acquired the Shenandoah Valley Railroad, which ran from Roanoke, Virginia, to Hagerstown, Maryland. By 1891, an Ohio extension was well underway, giving the railroad access to the industrial Midwest. In 1892, Norfolk and Western leased the Roanoke and Southern Railroad, connecting Roanoke with Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and in 1893 it leased the Lynchburg and Durham, connecting Lynchburg with Durham, North Carolina. But this program of expansion, coupled with the economic depression of the 1890s, forced the railroad into receivership in 1895. It emerged as the reorganized Norfolk and Western Railway the next year.
The Southern Railway was created in 1894 through the reorganization of the Richmond and Danville Railroad-Richmond and West Point Terminal Railway and Warehouse Company complex. Southern's origins, however, can be dated to 1827, when the earliest of its antecedents, the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, was chartered. This line, which ran 136 miles from Charleston to Hamburg, South Carolina, was for a time in the 1830s the longest railroad in the world. Other antebellum predecessors of the Southern Railway system include the Hiwassee Railroad incorporated in Tennessee in 1836 and the forerunner of the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad system) and the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, chartered in 1846.
Southern's direct predecessor, the Richmond and Danville Railroad, was incorporated in Virginia in 1847; its main line, connecting Richmond and Danville, was opened in 1856. The Richmond and Danville's early acquisitions included the Piedmont Railroad (1866), the North Carolina Railroad (1871), and the Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta Railroad (1878). Because its charter prohibited the acquisition of any but connecting lines, the Richmond and Danville created the Richmond and West Point Terminal Railway and Warehouse Company in 1880 to acquire properties not directly connected with it. The Richmond Terminal Company quickly gained control of hundreds of miles of completed railroads and franchises for prospective railroads such as the Georgia Pacific, which ran from Atlanta, Georgia, to Greenville, Mississippi.
Like the Norfolk and Western Railroad, both the Richmond and Danville Railroad and the Richmond Terminal Company went into receivership in the mid-1890s. Reorganized by the New York banking firm of Drexel, Morgan and Company, they emerged in 1894 as the Southern Railway Company, which controlled over 4,000 miles of line at its inception. Samuel Spencer, Southern's first president, cemented together a railroad network that is the basis of the Southern Railway of today.
Two studies of the Norfolk and Western Railway and Southern Railway systems provide detailed information on their history. They are: E. F. Pat Striplin, The Norfolk And Western: A History (Roanoke, Va.: The Norfolk and Western Railway Co., 1981) and Burke Davis, The Southern Railway: Road Of The Innovators (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Historical information on many of the railroads is also improvided below.
For some of the railroads whose records are described below, only the most basic records--stockholders' and directors' minutes--are available. For others, however, the documentation available to researchers is much greater, both in terms of the variety and the extent of the records that have survived. In such cases, minute books may be supplemented by correspondence and reports, financial and construction records, and information on stockholders and employees. Railroads for which such extensive documentation exists include the Norfolk and Western and its direct predecessors, the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio, the Norfolk and Petersburg, the Southside, and the Virginia and Tennessee; the Shenandoah Valley; and the Georgia Pacific. It should be remembered, too, that before the 1880s minute books usually included information in addition to minutes--copies of correspondence, reports, and financial accounts, for example. In cases where minute books alone are available, therefore, the documentation may be greater than it appears.
Suitable records have been added to the railroad archives as they are uncovered by Norfolk and Western Railway and Southern Railway officials. Thus, for example, the pre-Civil War accounting records of the Norfolk and Western predecessor companies were located in a Roanoke warehouse in 1985 and added to the archives in l986. A limited number of Southern Railway records, primarily the early files of president Samuel Spencer and several Southern vice- presidents, were added in 1987. And in 1988 some 35,000 pre-1960 historical photographs were added to the Norfolk and Western Railroad and Norfolk and Western Railway collections. The manuscript reminiscences of Herman Haupt, chief of construction and transportation for the Union military railroad system (though not technically part of the railroad archives) were added to the collections in 1988 and are described in this guide. Norfolk Southern made a large donation of railroad route maps in 1992, as well as a donation of railroad bridge drawings in 1994.
The Special Collections Department is located on the first floor of Newman Library at Virginia Tech. Its hours are Mondays, Noon to 4:30 p.m.; Tuesdays, 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.; Wednesdays through Fridays, 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; and Saturdays 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Academic break and summer hours are Mondays, Noon to 4:30 p.m. and Tuesdays through Fridays, 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Researchers interested in obtaining more information about any of the collections described below are invited to inquire in person or to contact:
Special Collections Department
University Libraries
Virginia
Tech
P.O. Box 90001
Blacksburg, VA
24062-9001
(540)231-6308
FAX: (540)231-9263