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120 • Blue Ridge Railroad Building schemes during the Railway Age did not always work out as planned. The goals of bold, long-distance lines made by some promoters , including those who backed the Louisville, Cincinnati & Charleston Rail Road (LC&C), were not achieved, but other energetic proposals succeeded . The much publicized New York, Pittsburgh & Chicago Railway was one notable flop. This grandiose project, organized at the turn of the twentieth century, was intended to be a high-density, low-grade freight line that would compete directly with the busy main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad between Gotham and the Windy City. But construction neverbegan.Ontheotherhand,backersofthetranscontinentalNorthern Pacific Railroad embarked on building that difficult route through tamarack swamps, desolate badlands, rugged mountains and mostly unpopulatedcountrybetweenLakeSuperiorand PugetSound.“Youcan’tbuild a railroad from nowhere to nowhere,” quipped Cornelius Vanderbilt about the Northern Pacific. But that monumental struggle, begun in 1864 with aidfromafederallandgrant,endedsuccessfullyin1883,andclaimedtobe the nation’s single greatest corporate undertaking of the era. Then there were those projects that started, sputtered along after completing some mileage,butneverachievedtheirobjectives.Agoodexampleinvolvedthe tireless efforts made by Gilded Age entrepreneur and visionary Arthur Stilwell, who sought to push his Kansas City, Mexico & Orient Railway from Kansas City, Missouri, to Topolobampo, Sinaloa, Mexico. He succeeded in creating a much smaller road, connecting Wichita, Kansas, with Alpine, Texas, and completing modest sections in Mexico under the banner of the Kansas City, Mexico y Oriente Railway.1 SimilartotheStilwellroadwasthemoremodestBlueRidgeRailroad, a latter-day remnant of the transmontane LC&C scheme. This project, which planned to breach the Appalachian Mountains with iron ribbons, WhatHappened 6 W h at H a p p e n e d 121 saw some construction, but ultimately it never linked its announced end points. The Knoxville Railroad Convention wanted to span with rails the nearly 700 miles between the Atlantic Ocean and the Ohio River. This grand interregional undertaking turned out to be more than a paper or “hot-air” proposal. Under the LC&C flag about 10 percent of the projected line was completed, namely between the South-Carolina Canal and Rail-Road Company at Branchville and Columbia. But prior to the outbreak of the Civil War another short piece of this proposed Charleston to Cincinnati road opened, although not along the route fixed by surveyors, approved by directors, and championed by Robert Hayne. This revived project resembled the path that John C. Calhoun had advocated following the Knoxville assembly. Promoters of the Blue Ridge Railroad, led by prominent Charleston merchants Henry Gourdin (first president of the company ) and George Trenholm, believed that their choice of how the iron horse should conquer the mountains “offered a more practical route for a railroad to the West than that adopted by the Louisville, Cincinnati and Charleston.” Admittedly, the Blue Ridge Railroad was hardly a proud legacy of the Knoxville delegates.2 Those dreams so powerfully articulated in Knoxville remained alive. Almost sixteen years to the day later, that persistence sparked another, albeit modest-size, railroad convention. On July 1, 1852, this gathering took place in Anderson Court House (Anderson), South Carolina, seat of Anderson District and not far from the Calhoun family plantation at Fort Hill.DelegatesfromSouthCarolina,includingastrongandlivelycontingent from Charleston, joined representatives from neighboring Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee to revive the project in a modified form.3 Most of the groundwork had already been laid before the convention convened. In hopeful anticipation of the transmontane route, Tennessee lawmakers had incorporated the Knoxville and Charleston Railroad, which would build southeastward from Knoxville to the North Carolina line, or as its charter said, “from the city of Knoxville in the direction of Charleston, South Carolina.” The North Carolina legislature had sanctionedaconnectinglinkbycreatingtheTennesseeRiverRailroad ,which would proceed through the valley of the Little Tennessee River “to the point where the line of the State of Georgia crosses said river above the village of Franklin in the County of Macon.” Georgia politicians had followedsuit ,charteringtheBlueRidgeRailroad[inGeorgia]thatwouldtie the Volunteer and Tar Heel projects to South Carolina by way of Rabun Gap. This natural passageway through the Blue Ridge chain of the Appalachians was near the source of the Little Tennessee River and about a 8.119.253.93] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 11:48 GMT) T h e L o u i s v i l l e , C i n c i n n at i & C h a r l e s t o n R a i l R o a d 122 dozenmilesnorthofClayton,Georgia.RecentlycadetsfromtheMilitary Academy of South Carolina (the Citadel) in Charleston, supervised by an experienced officer...

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