The photograph of James J. Andrews, Union spy, shows a young man with an Amish-style beard and a smoldering glare.
It was taken in the early 1860s, around the same time he and a bold party of federal soldiers and civilians stole a locomotive known as the General in Big Shanty, Ga., (later called Kennesaw) and raced for Chattanooga, Tenn., cutting telegraph lines and attempting to destroy tracks along the way.
It was a daring raid behind enemy lines, but a failure. Their explosives couldn’t disable the well-made railroad tracks. Bridges, soaked by rain, failed to burn. Out of fuel, the raiders abandoned the General north of Ringgold and headed for the woods, only to be rounded up by Confederates within two weeks. Andrews would be executed, hanged for “unlawful belligerency” and attempting to derail the war effort.
New insight into this 1862 caper, called the Great Locomotive Chase, is now cropping up at the Southern Museum of Civil War & Locomotive History, where archivists are unpacking a mother lode of documents, photographs and artifacts.
The material comes from the estate of the late Col. James G. Bogle of Decatur, a career Army officer and lifelong fan of railroad memorabilia. Bogle, who died in 2010 at the age of 94, collected more than 30,000 photographs, thousands of documents and a panoply of objects, such as an actual piece of U-shaped rail that was in use along the Western & Atlantic line in the 1860s, and could very well have felt the General’s wheels.
“He kept everything,” said curator Jonathan Scott. “In his garage and basement — he had the original man cave. You’d go in there and it would be floor to ceiling.”
Bogle was instrumental in getting the first Southern Museum of Civil War & Locomotive History built in 1972, and has been a great help to the museum through the years, Scott said. “He put so much energy into expanding the story told here.”
To read more about the Bogle collection, go to on-myajc.com/1pGLrOm
