MUSEUM
The Southern Museum of Civil War & Locomotive History is open 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Sundays. Tickets, $5.50-$7.50. 2829 Cherokee St., Kennesaw. 770-427-2117, www.southernmuseum.org/.
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 called the General in Big Shanty, Ga., (also 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. 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.”
The collector eventually added three rooms to his Decatur home to help accommodate his collection, said his daughter, Alice B. Lyons. “All of the Andrews Raid information was in the basement, cataloged and filed with great detail and organization.”
Bogle was instrumental in getting the first Southern Museum of Civil War & Locomotive History built in 1972, and was a great help to the museum through the years, Scott said. “He put so much energy into expanding the story told here.”
It’s a great story. After being put off his own train, conductor William Allen Fuller actually pursued the slow-moving General on foot, alternately trotting and pumping a handcar all the way to Etowah. He eventually commandeered the Texas, and ran it backward, tender first, to catch up with the General.
Bogle collected “carte-de-visites” — a sort of photographic 19th-century calling card — featuring Fuller, including one from later years, and one of the determined younger man who refused to let his locomotive get away.
Atlanta historian Wilbur Kurtz, who was the adviser to the makers of “Gone With the Wind,” had a personal connection to the story of the chase: He married Fuller’s daughter, Annie Laurie Fuller. He was also friends with Bogle, and gave Bogle many hand-drawn maps and other documentation of the escapade.
When Walt Disney came to town to film a movie about the chase, Kurtz served as adviser, and gave Bogle snapshots of the eminent Mouseketeer taken behind the scenes, along with photos of leading man Fess Parker.
The General has been refurbished at least four times since the war, and now resides in the Kennesaw museum. About half of the parts from the 1862 train have been replaced, Scott said. But Bogle helped contribute a few more original pieces, including a small plug of wood cut out of the cab in the 1960s to make room for a modern water injection system.
The Texas, meanwhile, is housed in Grant Park, with the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama. The city has announced plans to move the painting and the locomotive to a yet-to-be-constructed building on the campus of the Atlanta History Center in Buckhead.
Richard Banz, executive director of the Southern Museum, says he’d love to see the Texas come to his Kennesaw facility, “but inevitably that’s not our decision.”
On the other hand, he said, “The Texas is always on our mind.”
Archivist Sallie Loy said she and her colleagues have only begun cataloging the huge amount of material from the Bogle collection, and don’t expect to be done for many months. They will have plenty of room to store it in a new 8,700-square-foot research center, soon to break ground and slated to open next year.
