The First Railroad Across Tennessee

An old steam engine from the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway

On December 13, 1850, the steamboat Beauty brought something from Cincinnati to Nashville that most people in Tennessee had never seen before. It was called a locomotive.

At the time Nashville was not connected to another city by rail; to get to another place you had to take a boat, a stagecoach, or a horse. Virtually everything that was produced in Nashville left on the Cumberland River to be traded in New Orleans. But several years earlier State Senator John Overton and newspaper editor A. O. P. Nicholson had begun organizing support for a new rail line to Chattanooga.


The NC&StL line today
The idea of the railroad was to hook up with another rail line then under construction that led from Chattanooga to Savannah, Georgia. The railroad would give Middle Tennessee’s farmers access to Atlantic coast markets, plus give Nashville’s companies access to untapped coal reserves in southeastern Tennessee. “The produce of Middle Tennessee, instead of passing over 2,460 miles of dangerous navigation with heavy insurance and many transshipments, would reach Charleston or Savannah in twenty-eight hours . . . at one-fifth the cost and in one tenth the time,” Overton argued. 


Overton and Nicholson got the Tennessee General Assembly to grant their railroad a charter and give it the power to force people to sell land to it (or, the power of eminent domain) in 1845. It was originally called the Nashville and Chattanooga Railway (and much later became known at the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway). They then hired Nashville businessman Vernon Stevenson to raise money for the project. Stevenson practically went door to door in Nashville selling stock in the new venture. But, in the end, it was the citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, who ensured the project's success by investing $500,000 in it.
The NC&StL line is the one that goes from Nashville to Stevenson, Alabama
Crews began laying out the rail line from Nashville to Chattanooga in 1847. Because the mountains in Grundy and Marion counties were so large, the line took a circuitous route, through Rutherford, Bedford, Coffee, and Frankin counties and into northeast Alabama. The track then turned toward Chattanooga in a new town in Alabama named for Vernon Stevenson.

The project was monumental, and the most difficult part of it was a 2,200-foot tunnel under the Cumberland Mountains. “Work was carried on in three shifts,” Wilbur Creighton wrote in a book called The Building of Nashville. “The drilling was done by hand, since the steam drill had not been perfected at the time. One man would hold and turn a short length of steel bit, while two others struck it with eight-pound hammers.”

Most of the laborers who built this tunnel were African-American slaves. The tunnel was located near Cowan, Tennessee -- now the site of a railroad museum. Click here to take a virtual tour of the Cowan Railroad Museum.


The story announcing the arrival of the first locomotive in Nashville
By the time the Beauty brought its enormous cargo upstream in December 1850, Nashville and its newspapers were excited at the prospect of rail travel. Along with the locomotive the steamboat brought 13 freight cars and one fancy passenger car, which got high praise from Nashville’s afternoon newspaper. “The passenger car is a very beautiful piece of workmanship, the seats of mahogany with figured plush cushions,” the Republican Banner reported, in a tiny story headlined “The Iron Horse Arrived At Last.”

Horses later dragged the locomotive, freight cars and passenger cars to the new Nashville and Chattanooga terminal (located about where Nashville's Church Street crosses over the train gulch today).

Then, in the spring of 1851, the train made its first trip, an 11-mile jaunt to nearby Antioch, Tenn. It was a glorious and exciting day for Nashville; only the important and the lucky got to ride on that first train.


The Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad Depot in Nashville during the Civil War
PHOTO: Library of Congress
One leg after another would be opened during the next few years until Nashville was finally connected to Chattanooga in 1854.

The opening of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad connected Middle Tennessee with the Atlantic coast but did nothing to connect Nashville to Midwestern cities such as Chicago and Indianapolis. That would come in December 1859, when the trunk line of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad was completed.

Not long after that, Civil War broke out between the North and the South. If there were any doubters left about the power of the railroads they would be silenced during the course of that war. The Union Army used the Louisville & Nashville Railroad to support its army in Nashville and followed the Nashville and Chattanooga line in its invasion of the South.


The tiny post office in Fosterville, an old stop on the NC&StL Railway
Today the original Nashville and Chattanooga line still runs from Nashville through Rutherford, Bedford, Coffee, and Franklin counties en route to Stevenson, Alabama, where it turns northeast to Chattanooga. But these days, the communities that grow are the ones located along highways. There's hardly anything left of the towns that cropped up along the train track in the old days.
The Stevenson Railroad Depot Museum
PHOTO: John Peterson
There is, however, a train station here or there that has been preserved. One of them is in Stevenson, Alabama. Click here to be taken to it.

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