Burlington & Missouri
River Railroad
http://www.nebraskahistory.org/publish/publicat/timeline/calvert_thomas_e.htm
Thomas E. Calvert and the Burlington and Missouri River
Railroad
Thomas E. Calvert, an engineer at the time the Burlington
and Missouri River Railroad was built in Nebraska, described
briefly the construction of the road in an 1898 letter to
former U.S. Senator Charles F. Manderson: "It is probably
not generally known by the people of our state that at the
time of the construction of the Road, those immediately in
charge, Mr. Cyrus Woodman, V. P. and Managing Director and
Mr. Thos. Doane, Chief Engineer, looked upon the venture
with considerable doubt, . . . Mr. Woodman in a letter
giving his views expressed himself as doubtful if it would
pay to extend the Road beyond a point where Hastings now
is."
Calvert recalled that when the railroad had been built to
Fort Kearny in 1871 and the locations selected for side
tracks, "it seemed necessary that some one make a beginning
[and] the Railroad Company arranged to have built at each
point four small two-story frame houses. These buildings
though quite small appeared to be immense in the mirage so
frequent in those hot summer days and could be seen for many
miles, there being no trees in sight anywhere or other
things that raised above the surface of the plane. The
stations so located were named from Crete west with names
having first letter in alphabetical order [Crete,
Dorchester, Exeter, Fairmont, Grafton, Harvard, Inland,
Juniata, Kenesaw, and Lowell]. Later new points sprung up at
Friend, Sutton, Saronville, Hastings, and Newark."
Calvert stated that "during the years 1872 to 1874 (The
Grasshopper years) the business was very discouraging
especially in the new and sparsely settled country west of
the Big Blue River. In 1874 we ran from Crete west, a
tri-weekly mixed train going through Crete to Kearney one
day and returning the next. As an indication of the business
which that train did it is related that on one round trip it
did not earn one cent from either freight or passenger
business. Westbound it had a quantity of free freight for
the grasshopper sufferers in Smith County, Kansas. Eastbound
the next day it had one green hide removed from the carcass
of a cow killed by the locomotive on its way west the day
before and it looked for a long time as though we had indeed
built too much R. R." Calvert concluded by remarking on the
later prosperity of the Burlington and the "wonderful change
[that] has come over the great American desert."
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