FROM THE ARCHIVES - THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY - PART 1

(old photo found at pixabay.com)This is from an old post in May of 2009.  Exhibits may have changed since the last time we visited. Its history hasn't and I hope you will still enjoy the photos. We started our visit looking around the transport section of the museum. Above is the Steam Locomotive Jupiter made in Philadelphia in 1876. Jupiter was the Santa Cruz Railroad's third locomotive. Built for narrow-gauge track (36 inches between rails), Jupiter became obsolete in 1883 when the line switched to standard gauge (56-1/2 inches). Jupiter was sold to Guatemala, where it hauled bananas for more than 60 years. In 1976 it came to the Smithsonian as part of the United States Bicentennial Exhibition (whether it is still there I am not sure but I found this link with some history of Jupiter. It is a fascinating story.)

I am assuming this is a reproduction as according to the website's article, the original was scrapped in the early 1900s. However, another was reproduced in 1975 by the O'Connor Engineering Laboratories of Costa Mesa, California. (I try to remember to take photos of the historical information at each exhibit and read them when I get back home. I remember more this way. That is how I got my information for my post.) 

I enjoyed the sculptures at various exhibits, people dressed as they would have been during that time.

"There's always light after the dark. You have to go through that dark place to get to it but it's there, waiting for you. It's like riding on a train through a dark tunnel. If you get so scared you jump off in the middle of the ride, then you're there, in the tunnel, stuck in the dark. You have to ride the train all the way to the end of the road."

~Han Nolan~

(I didn't get the information on this locomotive at the time, but since catching up I put "old steam train 1401" in the search engine and happily it sent me right to the website I needed. You can read about it here.)

"To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers, in fact, to see life."

~Agatha Christie~

"Nowhere can I think so happily as in a train."

~A. A. Milne~

This photo doesn't show you much as I was more taken with the horse sculpture, but he is pulling a Kramer Farm Wagon from 1925.The previous link takes you to what it looks like as the website is from the museum. Farmers wagons served many purposes. They picked up and delivered goods and also served as passenger vehicles when benches of extra wagon seats were added in 1926, despite the growing use of automobiles, more than 200,000 wagons were manufactured, and millions were still in use around the country.

This gentleman is a Pullman Porter. In the 1920's the Pullman Company was the largest single employee of African American men. From the 1870's through the 1960's, tens of thousands worked for Pullman as sleeping-car porters. The feeling of sleeping-car luxury came from the porter. He "made-down' berths at night and "made-up" berths into seating in the morning, helped with luggage and answered passengers calls at any hour. Working 400 hours a month, porters earned wages better than most African Americans, but degrading conditions helped lead to the founding of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925.

The photo below was taken in Salisbury, North Carolina in 1927. In the community, although they were servants on the job, at home they were respected members of their communities. Porters traveled extensively and connected their communities to a wider world. From the 1920's to the 1940's, porters helped southern African Americans migrate by bringing back information on jobs and housing in the North. Porters were also involved in civil rights activity. Pullman Porter E. D. Nixon helped plan the Montgomery-Alabama bus boycott of 1955-56. Union leader A. Philip Randolph pressured Franklyn Roosevelt into issuing Executive Order 8802 in 1941. It barred discrimination in defense industries and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Later Randolph was involved in planning the 1963 civil rights march on Washington DC. Peaceful protestors were and are the heart of getting things changed for the better.

The Railroad Conductor's job involved more than collecting tickets. He was the "captain" of the train. He supervised other train crew, looked out for the safety of everyone aboard and made sure every passenger paid the correct fare. The engineer was responsible for signals and speed restrictions enroute, but the conductor determined when a train could safely depart a station and was in charge of emergencies. The conductor's role as chief of the train came from maritime tradition. Many conductors on the first American railroads in the 1830's had been steamboat or coastal packet captains.

The last photo shows Conductor John W. Zimmer greeting a passenger in Burlington, Iowa in 1925.

There are links throughout my post to websites with more information. The one to the museum can be found here. I will have two more to share from the museum sometime at a later date.