February 13, 2026 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, The Texas is one of the last surviving locomotives of the Western & Atlantic Railroad, the line that helped create Atlanta, and played a starring role as the pursuit engine in the Great Locomotive Chase during the Civil War. Jackson McQuigg of the Atlanta History Museum explains how the Texas chased the stolen General at extreme speed, how it later served in wartime logistics, and how it narrowly avoided being scrapped again and again.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including your story. Send them to Ouramerican Stories dot com.
There's some of our favorites. Up next, a story from
the Atlanta History Center, a great museum where you can
see exhibits like the massive Cyclorama painting and a locomotive
(00:30):
with a truly unique story, the Texas built four years
before Lincoln was elected. The locomotive is best known today
as the principal pursuit engine in the Great Locomotive Chase,
which occurred after Union spies stole her running mate, the General.
But the story goes far deeper than that. Here's Jackson mcquigg,
(00:51):
vice president of Properties at the Atlanta History Center, with
the story.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I want to say I was born into it, but
I have been a fan of railroads and interested in
railroads pretty much all my life. That's something that I
shared with my dad, and growing up in Tampa, Florida
with deep roots in Atlanta, Atlanta's history was always of
interest to me and I think that you know, by
the age of like fourteen, I was volunteering at the
(01:24):
Florida Railroad Museum scraping paint and doing all the things
that older people didn't want to do, you know. And
I've just always been fascinated by trains. I mean, it
is just absolutely one of the most fascinating technologies. And
I think I'm interested in it because, you know, travel
is such a fun thing and there's no better way
(01:45):
to go than traveling by train. You can visit with
friends and have a drink, have a meal, look out
the window. You can get on a sleeping car and
see the world go by overnight. I just think there's
nothing better. Atlanta is very, very new by comparison to
(02:07):
many cities. Savannah is a century older than Atlanta. Atlanta
is only about the same age as Los Angeles. I mean,
it's a very new city. So when a surveyor for
the Western and Atlantic Railroad drove a stake in the ground,
a wooden surveyor state right about where State Farm Arena
(02:29):
is today, Atlanta didn't exist, and Atlanta gradually became a
railroad hub of One of the nicknames for Atlanta, in fact,
is the Chicago of the South, so the locomotive Texas.
It's only one of two locomotives left from the Western Atlantic.
(02:51):
The very railroad that Atlanta owes its existence to. If
you think about that for a second, the tangible links
to the city's past are really few. Atlanta is a
city that likes to redevelop itself over time. Sherman burned,
it also suffered a cataclysmic fire, and development has really
(03:11):
changed the way Atlanta has looked time and time again.
But this locomotive, like its sister of the General, date
back to the eighteen fifties. This is unusual for Atlanta.
My boss likes to say they're the romulus and remiss
of Atlanta. I think that's a great SoundBite, and he's
almost right. But the locomotive was one of the two
(03:34):
participants in the Great Locomotive Chase, which is a Civil
War incident of some note and certainly a lot of coverage.
The chase involved three different locomotives, a pool car running
two miles, and you name it. It's really an interesting story.
(03:58):
During eighteen sixty two April of eighteen sixty two, as
a matter of fact, there were a group of Union
spies that had made it behind Confederate lines, and the
effort was to disrupt the Western Atlantic Railroad in order
to ultimately take Nashville, and if you could cut Nashville
off from the rest of the South and Chattanooga as well,
(04:21):
you would hurt the Confederacy. So they made it behind
the lines of the Confederates, dressed in civilian clothes, got
on a train in Atlanta. When the train got to
what was called Big Shanny in those days, everybody got
off the train go eat and in that case breakfast.
(04:41):
There was no club card of Bloody Mary's and stuff
in at that point, so they're the last ones left
on the train. Everybody's eating breakfast at the Lacey Hotel.
And I gave them their opportunity to steal the locomotive
General and head north. And it was to get far ahead,
(05:03):
tear up track, disrupt telegraph lines, and really put a
severe crimp into the Confederacy's war efforts. But what they
didn't count on was that the crew of the General
decided to give chase to these guys and try to
catch the General locomotive as it was going up the line.
(05:27):
The pursuers, Captain William Fuller and others wound up finding
the Texas found that it had a good head of
steam and it had enough fuel that it could be
run to chase after the General. They decided, well, heck,
average track speads fifteen miles an hour, let's do fifty.
Let's do it in reverse, let's do it on track.
(05:50):
That wouldn't be a good industrial sighting by today's standards.
This is really rudimentary railroading at that stage. It must
have been a frightening ride. I'm really glad that I
wasn't on it. It reflects the lack of caution that only,
you know, somebody who's pretty youthful can do and pretty
motivated by adrenaline, I would argue. Finally, the pursuers wound
(06:18):
up catching the raiders, led by James J. Andrews, so
they were known as Andrews Raiders. Sounds like a sixties band,
but there you have it. So, but they caught them,
captured them. Some were hanged, including Andrews who was hanged
here in Atlanta, and the pursuers were celebrated as full
(06:39):
heroes at the time because that was one where the
South won one, and so as a result, it became
the famous locomotive caught up to the General and achieved
a degree of fame just because it was the one
that won the chase.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
So to speak, and you've been listening to Jackson mcquig
telling stories about the thing he loves most and so
many Americans do. Always this country has been fascinated with
train travel. When we come back more of Jackson's stories
(07:17):
and more about trains and the Great Locomotive Chase here
on our American Stories. Leahvibe here, and I'm inviting you
to help our American Stories celebrate this country's two hundred
and fiftieth birthday only a short time away. If you
(07:37):
want to help inspire countless others to love America like
we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring
and important stories told ear to millions for years to come,
please consider making a tax deductible donations to our American Stories.
Go to Alamericanstories dot com and click the donate button.
Give a little, give a lot, any amount helps. Go
to Alamericanstories dot com and give. And we returned to
(08:10):
our American Stories in the story of Locomotive Texas. When
we last left off, Jackson mcquig was telling us about
the famous Great Locomotive Chase during the Civil War, which
the Texas participated in as the main pursuit locomotive. But
there's a lot more to the story than just that.
(08:30):
Here again is Jackson with the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
After the Great Locomotive Chase, it wound up in Virginia
because there was a salt mine up there. Of course,
at the time before refrigeration, salt was the way you
preserved food. It was actually captured and briefly used by
the US Military Railroad for a brief time before it
was setting back to Atlanta. The Texas very nearly wound
up being cut up for scrap a number of times,
(08:57):
and it certainly was very nearly abandoned in many cases.
Unlike the General, which is the other locomotive that participated
in the Great Locomotive Chase, which was preserved in the
it was preserved in the eighteen eighties. It was sort
of the one that was seen as the one that
needed to be preserved. It was a worn out locomotive
(09:19):
by nineteen hundred, really by the late eighteen nineties, and
historian Mark Brainard of Chattanooga found that there was this
fellow who was the master mechanic, in other words, the
guy in charge of the roundhouse here in Atlanta for
the Western in Atlantic and later for the Incent Saint
l which absorbed the Western in Atlanta, and he knew
(09:40):
about the history of the Texas. There wasn't a lot
of interest in preserving it, but he kind of made
sure that it never wound up on the retirement roster,
that he kept it hit out and busy, and I'm
sure he'd been told to get rid of the old
thing many times, but he kept it as a pet.
I mean, you know, this is the equivalent of of
(10:00):
trying to keep a nineteen forty on nobile kicking around
with your twenty twenty one Tesla. There's no logical reason
why that the locomotive should still be on the roster
of the NC and Saint l in nineteen hundred, but
yet it was. But we wound up in a scenario
with that engine we have at Lantins where it was
again looking like it would be scrapped again, and a
(10:29):
fellow by the name of Wilburt Kurtz, later to become
known as the Technical Advisor gone with the wind. An
interesting character all the way around, a man who was
pretty much consumed with a great locomotive chase, to the
point where he married the daughter of one of the
Southern pursuers. Kind of weird, isn't it. He began a
(10:51):
campaign that actually resulted in the saving of the Texas.
And when I say campaign, I mean letters to the
editor Grasswhoot's effort to get the locomotive preserved in part
because the General had been preserved the Civil War Veterans group,
the Grand Army of the Republic Union Soldiers had helped
(11:11):
to see that it got preserved, but the Texas had
no such love. So one of the Hirst newspapers here
in Atlanta, called the Atlanta Georgian, it began a campaign
right alongside Wilber Kurtz encouraged people to Atlantis to send
in their nickel and diamond contributions to help preserve the
Texas again. All this time it's sitting at the railroad
(11:31):
yard waiting it gets scrapped, you know. And that effort,
while it created a lot of interest, was not successful
at first. So lo and behold the locomotive owes its
very preservation. Not to that effort. Well, that helped, but
(11:53):
by a group of women who got together and found
great interest in saving the locomotive. They called themselves the
Ladies of Atlanta, and it was an ad hoc Group,
who effectively went to the president of the inc and
Saint al Railway and said, you're going to give us
this locomotive, and we're going to give it to the
(12:16):
City of Atlanta, and we're going to preserve it. And
of course, how could he disagree with the ladies of Atlanta.
He agreed and the locomotive was saved. It took six
years to get it to Grant Park, where it was
finally put under a shed on display in the park.
But at least it's at the park right in nineteen
(12:42):
twenty seven. The locomotive was actually put into the same
building as the Cyclorama in Grant Park. We moved the
locomotive in twenty fifteen, and it had been there so long.
It was literally in a basement level behind nineteen seventies
constructed theater where you saw the photo or the intro
(13:05):
film about what the Cyclorama was. So we had to
extricate the locomotive out of that building by running it
through a movie theater, which I think is a first. Oh,
and the movie theater was underground, so we had to
dig down to get to it.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
It was a.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Truly fun, bizarre day when we took the locomotive out
of Grant Park and out of the old Cyclorama building,
put it on a truck shipped up to the North
Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer, where I used to work.
We really got into seeing what was there. We found
(13:43):
out that there wasn't a lot of original Texas there.
The tender was from a different locomotive, the frame was
only half from the original Texas. The cave was different,
the boiler was different, the wheels were different, the cylinders
were different, and in fact, the bell was different. You
(14:03):
name it and it was from another locomotive or it
had been fad So what did we have here? Well,
we found out that the stand, the frame that actually
holds the bell onto the locomotive, that was from the
original Taxans. But we kind of felt liberated to tell
other stories about the locomotive's history. And since the Great
(14:24):
Locomotive Chase story is told in so many places, we
wanted to tell the broader context about railroads and being developers,
railroads being city shapers, railroads being our life's blood here
in Atlanta to this day. By the way, the decision
that we made after determining that the Texas contained a
(14:50):
lot of parts from engines that weren't the Texas. We
decided to paint it, and it's eighteen eighty six colors,
and that was indeed controversial. One of my friends, who
I knew would react poorly to the decision, saw a
picture on Facebook of the engine and just after it
had gotten painted at the museum in North Carolina and
(15:12):
tagged me in a post and said I had a
lot of explaining to do. In fact, this friend of
mine accused me of ruining his childhood, and that's a
direct quote, and to which my response was, well, well,
that must have been a pretty bad childhood, you know.
I mean, it's that was the most significant thing that
(15:33):
occurred in it. But you know what we say to
folks that are maybe a little concerned that it doesn't
look like it did during its Civil War years and
doesn't have the paint that was on it, it's just paint.
There were three pursuing locomotives and a great locomotive chase,
and the other two razor blades now they're gone. The
(15:56):
Texas got through by the skin and it's Steve, and
at various points we've been discussing it has been all
but forgotten through twenty fifteen. It was it was behind
glass panels. It was this look, don't touch artifact, You
couldn't go in the cab. You really didn't get to
understand too much about its history. It was just this
(16:18):
forgotten locomotive. It was just hard to relate to. And
you know, I'm a museum guy, and museum folks, well,
they're just really into like having visitors come and stand
at a distance sometimes from the objects. But you know,
the Texas is a durable object, and part of the
(16:40):
experience of it is to actually get in the cab
and see what it was like to be at the
throttle of that little, little, by today's standards locomotive. And
I think people really understand history more when they interact
with it physically. And the fact that you can do
that with the locomotive it was built in eighteen fifty six.
(17:01):
I think it was just kind of fine. Paul was
waiting for y'all. There are a couple of families that
came through and they all went in the cab of
the locomotive. Every one of them went into the cab.
I think that's neat. They just had the ability to
stand where history had taken place. And that's huge.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
And no doubt, indeed, it's huge when people can interact
with the nation's history. And a special thanks to Monty
for producing that piece and bumping into that story and
his travels around the country with Robbie. The two did
a road trip together and that's where we discovered Jackson
mcquig and he is the vice president of Properties at
(17:41):
the Atlanta History Center where they are keeping alive stories
about this great southern city. Jackson mcquig's story of the
Locomotive Texas here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
including your story. Send them to Ouramerican Stories dot com.
There's some of our favorites. Up next, a story from
the Atlanta History Center, a great museum where you can
see exhibits like the massive Cyclorama painting and a locomotive
(00:30):
with a truly unique story, the Texas built four years
before Lincoln was elected. The locomotive is best known today
as the principal pursuit engine in the Great Locomotive Chase,
which occurred after Union spies stole her running mate, the General.
But the story goes far deeper than that. Here's Jackson mcquigg,
(00:51):
vice president of Properties at the Atlanta History Center, with
the story.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
I want to say I was born into it, but
I have been a fan of railroads and interested in
railroads pretty much all my life. That's something that I
shared with my dad, and growing up in Tampa, Florida
with deep roots in Atlanta, Atlanta's history was always of
interest to me and I think that you know, by
the age of like fourteen, I was volunteering at the
(01:24):
Florida Railroad Museum scraping paint and doing all the things
that older people didn't want to do, you know. And
I've just always been fascinated by trains. I mean, it
is just absolutely one of the most fascinating technologies. And
I think I'm interested in it because, you know, travel
is such a fun thing and there's no better way
(01:45):
to go than traveling by train. You can visit with
friends and have a drink, have a meal, look out
the window. You can get on a sleeping car and
see the world go by overnight. I just think there's
nothing better. Atlanta is very, very new by comparison to
(02:07):
many cities. Savannah is a century older than Atlanta. Atlanta
is only about the same age as Los Angeles. I mean,
it's a very new city. So when a surveyor for
the Western and Atlantic Railroad drove a stake in the ground,
a wooden surveyor state right about where State Farm Arena
(02:29):
is today, Atlanta didn't exist, and Atlanta gradually became a
railroad hub of One of the nicknames for Atlanta, in fact,
is the Chicago of the South, so the locomotive Texas.
It's only one of two locomotives left from the Western Atlantic.
(02:51):
The very railroad that Atlanta owes its existence to. If
you think about that for a second, the tangible links
to the city's past are really few. Atlanta is a
city that likes to redevelop itself over time. Sherman burned,
it also suffered a cataclysmic fire, and development has really
(03:11):
changed the way Atlanta has looked time and time again.
But this locomotive, like its sister of the General, date
back to the eighteen fifties. This is unusual for Atlanta.
My boss likes to say they're the romulus and remiss
of Atlanta. I think that's a great SoundBite, and he's
almost right. But the locomotive was one of the two
(03:34):
participants in the Great Locomotive Chase, which is a Civil
War incident of some note and certainly a lot of coverage.
The chase involved three different locomotives, a pool car running
two miles, and you name it. It's really an interesting story.
(03:58):
During eighteen sixty two April of eighteen sixty two, as
a matter of fact, there were a group of Union
spies that had made it behind Confederate lines, and the
effort was to disrupt the Western Atlantic Railroad in order
to ultimately take Nashville, and if you could cut Nashville
off from the rest of the South and Chattanooga as well,
(04:21):
you would hurt the Confederacy. So they made it behind
the lines of the Confederates, dressed in civilian clothes, got
on a train in Atlanta. When the train got to
what was called Big Shanny in those days, everybody got
off the train go eat and in that case breakfast.
(04:41):
There was no club card of Bloody Mary's and stuff
in at that point, so they're the last ones left
on the train. Everybody's eating breakfast at the Lacey Hotel.
And I gave them their opportunity to steal the locomotive
General and head north. And it was to get far ahead,
(05:03):
tear up track, disrupt telegraph lines, and really put a
severe crimp into the Confederacy's war efforts. But what they
didn't count on was that the crew of the General
decided to give chase to these guys and try to
catch the General locomotive as it was going up the line.
(05:27):
The pursuers, Captain William Fuller and others wound up finding
the Texas found that it had a good head of
steam and it had enough fuel that it could be
run to chase after the General. They decided, well, heck,
average track speads fifteen miles an hour, let's do fifty.
Let's do it in reverse, let's do it on track.
(05:50):
That wouldn't be a good industrial sighting by today's standards.
This is really rudimentary railroading at that stage. It must
have been a frightening ride. I'm really glad that I
wasn't on it. It reflects the lack of caution that only,
you know, somebody who's pretty youthful can do and pretty
motivated by adrenaline, I would argue. Finally, the pursuers wound
(06:18):
up catching the raiders, led by James J. Andrews, so
they were known as Andrews Raiders. Sounds like a sixties band,
but there you have it. So, but they caught them,
captured them. Some were hanged, including Andrews who was hanged
here in Atlanta, and the pursuers were celebrated as full
(06:39):
heroes at the time because that was one where the
South won one, and so as a result, it became
the famous locomotive caught up to the General and achieved
a degree of fame just because it was the one
that won the chase.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
So to speak, and you've been listening to Jackson mcquig
telling stories about the thing he loves most and so
many Americans do. Always this country has been fascinated with
train travel. When we come back more of Jackson's stories
(07:17):
and more about trains and the Great Locomotive Chase here
on our American Stories. Leahvibe here, and I'm inviting you
to help our American Stories celebrate this country's two hundred
and fiftieth birthday only a short time away. If you
(07:37):
want to help inspire countless others to love America like
we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring
and important stories told ear to millions for years to come,
please consider making a tax deductible donations to our American Stories.
Go to Alamericanstories dot com and click the donate button.
Give a little, give a lot, any amount helps. Go
to Alamericanstories dot com and give. And we returned to
(08:10):
our American Stories in the story of Locomotive Texas. When
we last left off, Jackson mcquig was telling us about
the famous Great Locomotive Chase during the Civil War, which
the Texas participated in as the main pursuit locomotive. But
there's a lot more to the story than just that.
(08:30):
Here again is Jackson with the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
After the Great Locomotive Chase, it wound up in Virginia
because there was a salt mine up there. Of course,
at the time before refrigeration, salt was the way you
preserved food. It was actually captured and briefly used by
the US Military Railroad for a brief time before it
was setting back to Atlanta. The Texas very nearly wound
up being cut up for scrap a number of times,
(08:57):
and it certainly was very nearly abandoned in many cases.
Unlike the General, which is the other locomotive that participated
in the Great Locomotive Chase, which was preserved in the
it was preserved in the eighteen eighties. It was sort
of the one that was seen as the one that
needed to be preserved. It was a worn out locomotive
(09:19):
by nineteen hundred, really by the late eighteen nineties, and
historian Mark Brainard of Chattanooga found that there was this
fellow who was the master mechanic, in other words, the
guy in charge of the roundhouse here in Atlanta for
the Western in Atlantic and later for the Incent Saint
l which absorbed the Western in Atlanta, and he knew
(09:40):
about the history of the Texas. There wasn't a lot
of interest in preserving it, but he kind of made
sure that it never wound up on the retirement roster,
that he kept it hit out and busy, and I'm
sure he'd been told to get rid of the old
thing many times, but he kept it as a pet.
I mean, you know, this is the equivalent of of
(10:00):
trying to keep a nineteen forty on nobile kicking around
with your twenty twenty one Tesla. There's no logical reason
why that the locomotive should still be on the roster
of the NC and Saint l in nineteen hundred, but
yet it was. But we wound up in a scenario
with that engine we have at Lantins where it was
again looking like it would be scrapped again, and a
(10:29):
fellow by the name of Wilburt Kurtz, later to become
known as the Technical Advisor gone with the wind. An
interesting character all the way around, a man who was
pretty much consumed with a great locomotive chase, to the
point where he married the daughter of one of the
Southern pursuers. Kind of weird, isn't it. He began a
(10:51):
campaign that actually resulted in the saving of the Texas.
And when I say campaign, I mean letters to the
editor Grasswhoot's effort to get the locomotive preserved in part
because the General had been preserved the Civil War Veterans group,
the Grand Army of the Republic Union Soldiers had helped
(11:11):
to see that it got preserved, but the Texas had
no such love. So one of the Hirst newspapers here
in Atlanta, called the Atlanta Georgian, it began a campaign
right alongside Wilber Kurtz encouraged people to Atlantis to send
in their nickel and diamond contributions to help preserve the
Texas again. All this time it's sitting at the railroad
(11:31):
yard waiting it gets scrapped, you know. And that effort,
while it created a lot of interest, was not successful
at first. So lo and behold the locomotive owes its
very preservation. Not to that effort. Well, that helped, but
(11:53):
by a group of women who got together and found
great interest in saving the locomotive. They called themselves the
Ladies of Atlanta, and it was an ad hoc Group,
who effectively went to the president of the inc and
Saint al Railway and said, you're going to give us
this locomotive, and we're going to give it to the
(12:16):
City of Atlanta, and we're going to preserve it. And
of course, how could he disagree with the ladies of Atlanta.
He agreed and the locomotive was saved. It took six
years to get it to Grant Park, where it was
finally put under a shed on display in the park.
But at least it's at the park right in nineteen
(12:42):
twenty seven. The locomotive was actually put into the same
building as the Cyclorama in Grant Park. We moved the
locomotive in twenty fifteen, and it had been there so long.
It was literally in a basement level behind nineteen seventies
constructed theater where you saw the photo or the intro
(13:05):
film about what the Cyclorama was. So we had to
extricate the locomotive out of that building by running it
through a movie theater, which I think is a first. Oh,
and the movie theater was underground, so we had to
dig down to get to it.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
It was a.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Truly fun, bizarre day when we took the locomotive out
of Grant Park and out of the old Cyclorama building,
put it on a truck shipped up to the North
Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer, where I used to work.
We really got into seeing what was there. We found
(13:43):
out that there wasn't a lot of original Texas there.
The tender was from a different locomotive, the frame was
only half from the original Texas. The cave was different,
the boiler was different, the wheels were different, the cylinders
were different, and in fact, the bell was different. You
(14:03):
name it and it was from another locomotive or it
had been fad So what did we have here? Well,
we found out that the stand, the frame that actually
holds the bell onto the locomotive, that was from the
original Taxans. But we kind of felt liberated to tell
other stories about the locomotive's history. And since the Great
(14:24):
Locomotive Chase story is told in so many places, we
wanted to tell the broader context about railroads and being developers,
railroads being city shapers, railroads being our life's blood here
in Atlanta to this day. By the way, the decision
that we made after determining that the Texas contained a
(14:50):
lot of parts from engines that weren't the Texas. We
decided to paint it, and it's eighteen eighty six colors,
and that was indeed controversial. One of my friends, who
I knew would react poorly to the decision, saw a
picture on Facebook of the engine and just after it
had gotten painted at the museum in North Carolina and
(15:12):
tagged me in a post and said I had a
lot of explaining to do. In fact, this friend of
mine accused me of ruining his childhood, and that's a
direct quote, and to which my response was, well, well,
that must have been a pretty bad childhood, you know.
I mean, it's that was the most significant thing that
(15:33):
occurred in it. But you know what we say to
folks that are maybe a little concerned that it doesn't
look like it did during its Civil War years and
doesn't have the paint that was on it, it's just paint.
There were three pursuing locomotives and a great locomotive chase,
and the other two razor blades now they're gone. The
(15:56):
Texas got through by the skin and it's Steve, and
at various points we've been discussing it has been all
but forgotten through twenty fifteen. It was it was behind
glass panels. It was this look, don't touch artifact, You
couldn't go in the cab. You really didn't get to
understand too much about its history. It was just this
(16:18):
forgotten locomotive. It was just hard to relate to. And
you know, I'm a museum guy, and museum folks, well,
they're just really into like having visitors come and stand
at a distance sometimes from the objects. But you know,
the Texas is a durable object, and part of the
(16:40):
experience of it is to actually get in the cab
and see what it was like to be at the
throttle of that little, little, by today's standards locomotive. And
I think people really understand history more when they interact
with it physically. And the fact that you can do
that with the locomotive it was built in eighteen fifty six.
(17:01):
I think it was just kind of fine. Paul was
waiting for y'all. There are a couple of families that
came through and they all went in the cab of
the locomotive. Every one of them went into the cab.
I think that's neat. They just had the ability to
stand where history had taken place. And that's huge.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
And no doubt, indeed, it's huge when people can interact
with the nation's history. And a special thanks to Monty
for producing that piece and bumping into that story and
his travels around the country with Robbie. The two did
a road trip together and that's where we discovered Jackson
mcquig and he is the vice president of Properties at
(17:41):
the Atlanta History Center where they are keeping alive stories
about this great southern city. Jackson mcquig's story of the
Locomotive Texas here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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