Because the state government didn’t do much to help the railroads come to Tennessee, the first few attempts to bring the railroad here failed. Knoxville wanted a railroad badly because steamboats generally had a hard time making it up the Tennessee River that far. But several attempts by officials there to get a railroad failed.  

Memphis wanted a rail line that would head east and connect that city with the Atlantic Ocean. That effort failed too.

The first city to get a real rail connection was Chattanooga. The railroad was called the Western and Atlantic, and it was built by private investors and by the government of the state of Georgia to connect the brand new city of Atlanta (then known as Terminus) with the Tennessee River. Incredibly, it took 14 years to get the rail line finished, and the first train rolled into Chattanooga in 1850.

By the time Chattanooga got this railroad, businessmen in Nashville had already begun organizing a new railroad, one that would connect Nashville to Chattanooga (and thus the new Western and Atlantic Railroad). It took years to raise all the money. One thing that they did was to go to every town between Nashville and Chattanooga and ask for investments. As a general rule, towns willing to raise the most money were the ones who got the railroad through them. Towns that refused got passed up by the railroad. It was through a process like this that many old towns died, new towns were created, and some county seats were moved.

The Nashville and Chattanooga line was finished by 1854. By this time there were other railroads in the works across the state.

 A few other things about railroads that are important to know:

•  The companies that built the railroads weren’t so much thinking about money that they would make from moving people as they were moving things. By this time it had become clear that parts of Tennessee were great places to mine coal and phosphate. But you can’t move large amounts of heavy rocks by horse and wagon, and mines have a tendency to be located far away from big rivers. When the railroads went in, mining operations and mining towns came with them.
•  The main railroad lines were mainly built to get things from southern cities to northern cities where most of the big factories were and where more people lived. Because of this, all the major rail lines in Tennessee ran north-south rather than east-west. It would be many years before Tennessee had a railroad running east-west.

•  The railroads greatly reduced travel time from one part of the state to another. When the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad started operating, the trip from Nashville to Savannah, Georgia, was reduced from six days to only 28 hours.
•  Finally, don’t forget that the railroads were extremely hard to build – especially through the mountains. “The drilling was done by hand, since the steam drill had not been perfected at that time,” a man who worked on the tunnel through the Cumberland Mountains wrote. “One man would hold and turn a short length of steel bit, while two other struck it with eight-pound hammers.” And remember, slavery was still a part of Tennessee’s culture. So much of this work, maybe most of it, was done by African-American slaves.

QUIZ

2. The power to force someone to sell their land to you is known as the right of _________ _________.   

3. (TRUE OR FALSE) Memphis was the first city in Tennessee to get a railroad.