Childhood Memories of Railroad Trains

An ACL engine taken in Florence, SC, August 27, 1894, after

a fast run from Charleston.

A Pictorial History of Williamsburg County

Browsing through various news stories from 1929, I ran across this reminiscence from James H. Hogans, who lived in Kingstree when he was a small child. As an adult, he became one of the Pullman porters he had viewed as the heroes of his youth and wrote a regular column during the 1920s and 1930s for The New York Age, one of the most influential African American newspapers of the time. In fact, in an article called "The Platform: How Pullman porters used railways to engage in networked journalism," Allissa V. Richardson suggests that James H. Hogans was perhaps the most famous of these columnists. His columns earned him a loyal readership, and in 1936 he left his job as a Pullman porter after The Baltimore Afro-American offered him a full-time job as a columnist. This is his column from the March 9, 1929, issue of The New York Age:

Even when a child, railroad men and railroad trains fascinated my youthful imagination. To this day, the fast moving train, whether it is a freight or a passenger, it brings to me a wanderlust as it passes.

I became conscious of my existence in a village in South Carolina, called Kingstree. Perhaps it has expanded ere now to a town. I have heard that it has. But it my days there it was only a village, nestling amid pine, oak, maple and palmetto trees.

A 1930s passenger train steams through Williamsburg County.

A Pictorial History of Williamsburg County

My first recollections of railroad trains date back to those childhood days when I played around my father's blacksmith workshop. I can picture the old shop now, with its collection of broken wheels, bent axles, rusty plows, wagon bodies, carriage springs, and my father, with perspiration oozing from every pore in his brawny chest, annealing the red hot shoe to the size of the hoof patiently waiting to be shod. I can recall the many signs on the evils of credit which adorned its boarded walls. To my infantile mind this one always appeared awesome: "Poor Credit is Dead; Bad Pay Killed Him."

The shop was located near the tracks of the one railroad that passed through the village. Aside from the station whistle, fast freights and still faster passenger trains never slackened their speed in their mad race through the little community. Childlike, I often stood and wondered as they tore past my playground what made them in such a hurry. As I grew older, these things of speed began more and more to impress my imagination. The black man who waved to me as he walked atop of the swiftly moving cars, with all the nonchalance of a ground pedestrian, was my idea of a hero. That he was only a brakeman who had acquired the knack, and that this was only a part of his duty, were no part of my youthful knowledge.

But though I thought the black brakeman a more superior man, I deeply envied the black man, who I could see through the vestibule train windows. In those days an all-Pullman train was called a "vestibule train" by the people of our village. The name was derived, no doubt, from the fact that in those times, Pullmans were the only cars having enclosed platforms.

I remember seeing one of these trains stop near my playground. A white-coated man alighted from one of the cars. That the man was any place but New York never entered my little head; in fact, I was just old enough to think that none but one so clean-shaven, white-collared and white-liveried could hail from any other place. So, timidly I accosted him and inquired did he know my uncle "Pete" Hogans? The liveried person was quite nice about it. No, he didn't know my uncle "Pete," but he humored me by answering my various questions about trains.

AMTRAK still stops in Kingstree.

Several months later, my father received a telegram from another brother by the name of Andrew, who was also a porter, saying that his train which ran between Jacksonville and New York would make a stop at Kingstree on its way North, an unusual occurrence. When Uncle Andrew's train arrived, my childish brain was so fired with the luxuriousness of the train that I declared there and then to Father than nothing but a job like Uncle Andrew's would ever satisfy me.

But this infatuation with trains wasn't because I had never ridden on any. As a matter of fact, my family did considerable traveling between our home and Charleston, Florence, Orangeburg, and other places in the state. It was always a case of rejoicing when one of these trips was contemplated by the family. In those days the "Jim Crow" law had not poked its obnoxious frame in the Southland. There were no separate coaches for the races. And next to the anticipation of a trip, the thing that I always used to look forward to with the most childish eagerness was buying apples off the train's newsboy. Somehow it seemed that those boys carried the reddest and biggest apples I ever saw. Perhaps that was only another of my imaginations about trains. Anyway, those old day coaches always had to me the odor of apples.

Later in life, around my adolescent age, my parents sent me to school in Fayetteville, NC. My feelings for trains followed me there. I was matured enough then not to be impressed with the heroism of freight brakemen and the livery of Pullman porters, but the shrill blast from the engine at night used to always kindle my imagination and give me a yearning to follow in the wake of its sound.

A freight train approaches the Main Street crossing after the snow storm of 2018.

There used to be a railroad engineer running through Fayetteville by the name of Bonnie. If this article should come under the eyes of any old resident of that town, he will no doubt recall this engineman, for he was known to all its residents for the way in which he blew the whistle of his engine. The whistle, as I have since learned, was merely a road crossing signal, but this engineer thrilled you with its almost human cry. For miles away you could hear its echo. Many are the nights I have lain in bed with the sound of Bonnie's whistle pricking my receptive imagination of things in the outer world.

Through the kindness of Mr. Lucien White, musical editor of The Age, I had the pleasure not long since of enjoying, for the first time, the Hall Johnson Spiritual Singers. On this particular occasion (it may have been just a coincidence) three of the numbers on the program dealt with railroad trains. That observation helped to strengthen my trend to the belief, which thought I have expressed here before, that the motor car and the airplane may in time supplant the railroad train, but neither of these locomotions will ever stir the imagination of the child, the writer, the poet and the singer as has the railroad train.

DON'T FORGET the first Kingstree Live of the season is Friday night at the Depot from 6:30-9:30.