Atlanta, founded as a railroad town, now controls a vast rail archive
Before it was “Atlanta,” it was “Terminus,” named for the rail lines that brought the city into being in 1837.
As Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center put it: “Everything starts with the railroad.”
Without the rail, “We wouldn’t be at a place that’s 1,000 feet up that doesn’t have a navigable river” nor a natural water reservoir, he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
And so, it’s all the more appropriate that the city is now home to one of the nation’s largest research-level railroad archive collections, said Jackson McQuigg, the center’s vice president of properties and a transportation historian.
“It puts us on the map,” he said.
The History Center can now claim this thanks to a remarkable swap with Savannah’s Georgia Historical Society, which sent its Atlanta counterpart four truckloads of the archive of the former Central of Georgia Railroad.
That railroad traces its roots back to 1835 and was eventually acquired by Norfolk Southern in the 1970s.
Norfolk Southern this year donated $500,000 to the History Center for the cost of processing the new collection.
The History Center in exchange sent papers of former Gov. Benjamin Conley and Georgia social advocate Helen Dortch Longstreet to complete collections largely already residing in Savannah.
“This unprecedented collaboration reunites collections that have long been separated, ensuring Georgia’s history is protected and available to researchers, students, and the public for generations to come,” Atlanta-based Norfolk Southern said in a statement.
The news comes as Norfolk Southern is engaged in a proposed merger with Union Pacific that would place the new transcontinental railroad company’s headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska.
Hale said the company has been a great partner to the History Center.
But, he added, “With this (archive), they’ll be here forever because their records are here. Even if the CEO’s head rests on a pillow in Nebraska.”
‘A history of the whole state’
When Norfolk Southern acquired the Central of Georgia back the 1970s, it donated the Savannah-based railroad’s archive to the nearby Historical Society, its president and CEO, Todd Groce, told the AJC.
The collection was partially processed soon thereafter, but much of it sat in storage for decades.
“The problem for us was that here is basically our single-largest collection … but nobody’s using it,” Groce said.
Norfolk Southern moved its headquarters from Virginia to Atlanta several years ago, and it donated the massive archives of another precursor Georgia railroad — the Southern Railroad — to the Atlanta History Center in 2021.
Groce spotted an opportunity and approached Hale about a swap.
The resulting September transfer allowed the History Center to “put Humpty Dumpty back together,” Hale said, when it came to the archives of these two major Georgia railroads.
“One of the key things with archives is to have records accessible to people in the right place where they can see them. It’s a problem if you have some archives there, some archives in Savannah,” he said.
The swap also allowed the Historical Society to complete the collections of key Georgia figures.
The Southern archive, at roughly 380 cubic feet of files, is now one of the History Center’s most requested by researchers, McQuigg said.
The newly arrived Central of Georgia archive is nearly three times the size.
The deal “ended up being a win, not just for our institutions, but really more importantly, it’s a win for researchers. It’s a win for those who are trying to study Georgia history,” Groce said.
Because in all those files doesn’t just lie the history of railroads.
“That’s a history of the whole state. It’s a history of Atlanta,” Hale said.
Studying railroads allows you to study society, Groce added.
“The railroad touched everything. Even down to race relations. Labor relations,” he said.
Just glancing through the piles of books, blueprints and papers in the Atlanta History Center basement archive waiting to be processed, McQuigg found engineering plans assessing the decline of rail passenger traffic in the 1950s and an internal debate about switching from steam engines to diesel.
“So much of the history of Georgia can be traced back to this particular railroad’s records,” McQuigg said.
Archivists are set to begin processing the Central of Georgia archives in January, with a target completion date of December 2027.
About the Author
As a business reporter, Emma Hurt leads coverage of the Atlanta airport, Delta Air Lines, UPS, Norfolk Southern and other travel and logistics companies. Prior to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution she worked as an editor and Atlanta reporter for Axios, a politics reporter for WABE News and a business reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
