Ohio History Journal

OHIO'S UNSUNG PENITENTIARY RAILROAD

 

by WALTER RUMSEY MARVIN*

Had James Thurber spent his youth in Columbus two generations

before he did, he would now be regaling us with anecdotes about

a curious little railroad operation that enlivened the city for a few

years. By antiquarians and connoisseurs of the early iron horse, it

is sometimes whimsically hailed as the first railroad into Columbus,

a palm that more literal-minded scholars award to the Columbus

and Xenia line.

Looked at, on the other hand, in a cold, material light, the little

railroad in its early stages is seen to have been the key to the

legislative maneuvers of a group of Columbus businessmen. By

capitalizing on the return of the Whigs (the Republicans of their

day) to power in the state government, and using the tiny rail line

as a stalking horse, these men succeeded in selling the state a

quarry, in providing some indirect state aid for their Columbus and

Xenia Railroad, and in warding off the recurrent threat to move the

capital to another city.

When Ohio decided in 1838 to build a new capitol, or statehouse

as it was always called, it began to look as if the state fathers would

ere long be as well provided for as the state's convicts and lunatics,

both of which groups had just been supplied with fine modern

quarters. Much limestone was bought, the cornerstone laid, and a

rousing celebration held to start the building on its way. Suddenly

the legislature repealed the entire project. Their sagacity had been

foully reflected on by certain young men of Columbus, the law-

makers declared in a fit of pique, stimulated by some clever anti-

Columbus politics. Sentiment flared for moving the capital to a

more appreciative city.

A little group of Columbus businessmen stepped into the breach.

They got through the legislature a harmless-looking resolution

which said nothing as to a statehouse but appointed commissioners

* Walter Rumsey Marvin is executive director of the Martha Kinney Cooper Ohioana

Library Association. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was "Columbus and the

Railroads of Central Ohio Before the Civil War" (Ohio State University, 1953).

254

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Ohio's Unsung Penitentiary Railroad       255

 

to see about buying a quarry near the city. The limestone would

be used for new canal locks (why any were needed was not re-

vealed) and public buildings, and would surely be cheaper than

the stone the state had been buying. The commissioners were also

told to find out how much a right of way would cost (by impli-

cation, from the quarry to Columbus) and to report to the next

session. There the matter rested for four years while the lawmakers

took no further action. The businessmen, however, were not idle,

and in 1844 they pushed three measures through the legislature,

though one failed to be signed and to become a law.

Since they lacked the votes for openly committing the state to

Columbus as the permanent capital and for resuming work on the

embryonic statehouse, they settled for the next best thing. That

was a resolution which merely called for bringing in a revised set

of plans for a building to be erected at some unspecified "seat of

government." Three commissioners were put in charge: Joseph

Ridgway, Jr., of Franklin County, in which Columbus is located,

and William A. Adams of Muskingum County, both of whom had

been commissioners for the abortive building effort of 1838, and

Samuel Medary, also of Franklin County.

As their second move the Columbus entrepreneurs secured a

charter for a railroad to be known as the Columbus and Xenia,

which would run to the latter town and there connect with a line

going to Cincinnati. A rail connection between the state's biggest

city and the state capital (if it stayed at Columbus) sounded like a

profitable venture. This was not the first railroad launched in

Columbus, but it was to be the first to get beyond the talking stage

and start digging.

The charter named commissioners, as was nearly always done in

those days, to see to the organization of the company. Three were

from Columbus and four from other places along the line. The

Columbus commissioners were Samuel Medary, the same man ap-

pointed as one of the statehouse commissioners; Joseph Ridgway,

Sr., uncle of Ridgway, Jr., another statehouse commissioner (with

whom he was often confused in contemporary writings because of

the similarity in names), and William Dennison, Jr., son-in-law of

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the Columbus transportation magnate William     Neil, known as

"the stagecoach king."

Third on the Columbus agenda was an attempt to get the state to

build a few miles of railroad from a quarry to the penitentiary on

the edge of the city. There convict labor would dress the stone for

building purposes. A bill to this effect passed both houses, but then

fate turned against the promoters. The measure failed to become

law "by both houses adjourning before the bill was signed by the

speakers."1

What lay behind this puzzling episode is not shown, although

the aim of the bill was clear: to have transportation facilities ready

for the huge quantities of limestone which the new capitol would

need as soon as the lawmakers gave the green light. The measure-

ments of the building when finally completed--304 feet by 184 feet,

with foundation walls 12 to 15 feet thick--give an idea of the

amount of stone involved.

The railroad to a quarry had double value for Columbus. By

building it the state would virtually commit itself to keeping the

capital where it was. Some of its track, furthermore, and a bridge

it would have to build possibly could be used by the railroad from

Columbus to Xenia, thereby furnishing indirect state aid to that

project. Every foot of someone else's rails its trains could travel

over meant so much less capital the infant corporation had to raise.

It needed all the adventitious help it could get, for during the rest

of 1844 the company was unable to sell even the minimum amount

of stock its charter required for organization.

The legislative accomplishments of the Columbus promoters were

a good beginning, but they still had a long way to go. That fall

the results of the elections brought very welcome aid. Ohio was

carried by the Whigs, the businessmen's party, to which all the

group except Medary seem to have belonged. The result was a

legislature more sympathetic to their goals. By way of icing on the

cake, one of the two state representatives chosen in the Columbus

district was the younger Ridgway, the statehouse commissioner,

 

1 "Report of the Directors of the Ohio Penitentiary for the Year 1844," Ohio

Legislative Documents (Columbus, 1845), Vol. IX, Doc. No. 32, 4-5.

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Ohio's Unsung Penitentiary Railroad          257

 

who was completing a term as state senator. He held at the same

time several other public offices.

With the Whigs back in power in Ohio the group from Columbus

rolled up their sleeves when the legislature met in January 1845.

One of their first moves was a dinner party given by Ridgway, Jr.,

at the Neil House, the city's leading hotel, to win votes for their

program. This time they felt sure enough of themselves to intro-

duce a bill openly providing for the completion of the statehouse.

The bill also authorized the purchase of a quarry to furnish the

stone and the construction of a rail line to transport it. The latter

two provisions were the same as provisions in the ill-fated bill of

the year before.

The new measure touched many local interests. The city as a

whole naturally wanted to see the capitol finished. At least two

quarry owners hoped to sell to the state. The Neil House manage-

ment foresaw increased trade when the new statehouse, located

across the street, would be in use. The Columbus and Xenia Rail-

road stood to benefit in several ways. Finally, the Neils, who owned

the hotel, were related by marriage to the owner of one of the

quarries and were the chief promoters of the railroad to Xenia, in

which both quarry owners also were interested.

As a bit of lobbying the Ridgway dinner was an oddity, for

ladies were present, dancing was enjoyed, the guests sang a great

deal, and there was a large crowd, but, the Ohio State Journal

reported, "They had no wine." Whether the italicizing of "wine"

was the reporter's way of hinting that they did, nevertheless, have

ardent spirits, or whether it meant they served no champagne (often

referred to merely as wine) may never be known.² In any case the

legislators gave the Columbus group much of what they had sought

during that session of the general assembly.

It would be unjust to the lawmakers to conclude from this that

they acted solely in response to lobby pressure. To pass measures

helpful to business interests was to act in accordance with Whig

principles. The same session overhauled the banking structure of

the state, repealed various laws objectionable to businessmen, and

 

2 Ohio State Journal, January 24, 1845.

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258     Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

incorporated more new railroads than had been chartered for a

number of years.

The final item on the Columbus program was more help for the

city's leading rail project, the Columbus and Xenia Railroad. People

were not subscribing to its stock, so the legislature was appealed to

for amendments to the charter to make it easier to sell shares. The

most important change was doubtless that which allowed a buyer

to make his down payment of five dollars per share by signing a

note instead of putting up the cash.

At the end of the session the Columbus promoters could point

to substantial gains. They had failed, it is true, to secure legislation

to complete the statehouse and thus to assure the permanent location

of the capital in their city; that was too much to pry out of a

legislature still smarting from the injured feelings of earlier years.

Nevertheless their railroad to Xenia had been helped and the

purchase of a quarry and the construction of the related rail line

had been approved. It came as no surprise the next year when the

lawmakers went all the way and voted to complete the statehouse.

In the debate on buying a quarry it is significant that the bill's

supporters made no mention of the provision to build the little

railroad. They based their argument on the importance of keeping

the convicts in the penitentiary employed at tasks such as stone-

cutting, which was not considered to compete with free labor. The

authorization for the rail line clearly had the earmarks of a legis-

lative "joker."

That the line to the quarry was promoted with an ulterior purpose

seems probable. In addition to building a bridge and following a

route that could be used for a short distance by the railroad to

Xenia, the state's line as first planned had two more aspects service-

able to another railroad. They appeared in the text of the bill as

originally introduced.³ First, the line was to be equipped with the

still conventional wooden rails, but in such manner "as in the future

to admit the addition of iron rails." Second, the tracks were to

start at the site of the new statehouse, go to the penitentiary, and

thence to the quarry. This would have provided a right of way

 

3 Ibid., January 18, 1845.

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Ohio's Unsung Penitentiary Railroad           259

 

into the very heart of the city, with obvious possibilities for the

future. It would not have been likely, furthermore, that after so

much effort and expense the legislature would subsequently decide

to move the statehouse to another city. The legislature must have

had some doubts about these rather tendentious provisions, for

they were struck out of the bill.

What quarry to buy was to be decided by the penitentiary

authorities. Their choice narrowed to two, owned respectively by

a prominent Democrat and a prominent Whig. The property

farther from the city, and somewhat cheaper, belonged to Samuel

Medary, the statehouse and railroad commissioner, who had a far-

reaching reputation as the fiery editor of the Democratic party

organ, the Ohio Statesman of Columbus. The slogan "Fifty-four

forty or fight!" has been attributed to him.⁴ He was a dynamic

figure, deeply involved in several business enterprises as well as in

politics. Some years later during the Civil War his extreme anti-

war utterances nearly caused him to be lynched.

How shrewd a businessman the Democratic mouthpiece was, is

seen in the condition he proposed when offering his property for

sale. He demanded the free use as a common carrier of the rail-

road which the state was to build to the quarry. Since he seems to

have envisioned that little line as part of the railroad to Xenia, he

would have possessed, had the sale been made, a most valuable

privilege.

Nearer to the city and more expensive was the quarry belonging

to William Starling Sullivant, the Whig, who was a close associate

of William Neil, the "stagecoach king" and hotel owner. Neil's

son, Robert E., had recently married Sullivant's daughter. In busi-

ness and banking affairs Sullivant prospered so greatly that a few

years after the time with which we are concerned he could retire

from money-making activities and take up the career of amateur

scientist.

When it was announced that Sullivant's property was to be

bought, Medary let fly a blast charging the Whig penitentiary au-

 

4 William Alexander Taylor, Centennial History of Columbus and Franklin County,

Ohio (2 vols., Chicago and Columbus, 1909), II, 74.

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260    Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

 

thorities with wrongly favoring one of their own. A public meet-

ing, of which it is safe to guess that he was an instigator, denounced

the choice, and a torrent of editorials in his Ohio Statesman followed

suit. From this distance, nevertheless, Sullivant's quarry looks like

the better buy. Medary's outcries did not last long, for in a little

while he gave up his interest in the newspaper, perhaps because he

had lost his job as state printer when the Whigs abolished the

position.

Haste now became the watchword along both the state's railroad

and the private company's. The penitentiary immediately took title

to Sullivant's quarry and advertised for bids as the first step in con-

structing their rail line. Soon thereafter they agreed with the Co-

lumbus and Xenia Railroad to erect a two-track bridge, that com-

pany to pay half the cost. Its share came to $5,589.

The promoters of the private enterprise railroad were in just as

much hurry. With rail companies forming all over the state, the

far-seeing Neils did not want their concern to lag behind. As soon

as possible the Columbus and Xenia Railroad started taking sub-

scriptions for its stock, and in a suspiciously short time reported

that enough had been sold to comply with the revised charter and

to allow the company to organize. It later developed there had

been gross padding of the subscriptions.

The stockholders, or, more accurately, those who had signed notes

for their holdings, met at once and elected a board of directors

which included many familiar names: William Neil, his son

Robert E., the two Ridgways, Medary, and Sullivant. The elder

Neil was made president and Ridgway, Jr., secretary. The latter

had just been reelected to the Columbus city council, on which he

had already served for eight years.

The company promptly sent out a surveyor--identified only as

"General Stockton"--accompanied by two directors, who mapped

a preliminary route fifty-four miles long from Columbus to Xenia.

A second and more accurate survey was made three months later.

Not long thereafter, and as suddenly as they seemed to be doing

everything else, the directors laid off their engineering force and

halted all work by the company. It was not resumed for two years.

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Ohio's Unsung Penitentiary Railroad          261

 

The penitentiary railroad, which was just as often called the state

railroad, the quarry railroad, and the Olentangy railroad (although

it did not cross that tributary of the Scioto River), was meanwhile

pushed along without delay. The three miles of track, much of it

on an embankment to avoid floods on the Scioto, and the bridge

over that river were completed about the first of September 1846.⁵

Operating the line was the task of the directors and warden of

the penitentiary. By now one of the two directors was Ridgway, Jr.,

the Pooh-Bah of Columbus. What time he had left over from the

iron foundry, the warehouse, and the freight-forwarding businesses,

all of which he conducted with his uncle ("known through the state

as 'Honest Jo'"),6 he was free to devote to his duties as a director

and secretary of the Columbus and Xenia Railroad, member of the

city council, city recorder, statehouse commissioner, and state repre-

sentative, in addition to his new role of penitentiary director.

From being a stalking horse in legislative politics the state's little

rail line before long was figuring as an important campaign issue in

what were called the 1847 Railroad Elections. The people in Ohio's

local communities had the right, under certain conditions, to hold

a referendum on using public funds to buy stock in railroad, turn-

pike, and similar companies. Whig voters generally supported such

government aid for business, whereas the Democrats were inclined

to remember their Jacksonian principles and vote against "monop-

olies" and higher taxes.

In Columbus and Franklin County the backers of the line to

Xenia had teamed with a group supporting another proposed rail-

road in an effort to obtain a referendum vote on $200,000 aid to

the two lines. If the vote was favorable, each road would get

$50,000 from the city and the same sum from the county. The

second line, which planned to run from Columbus to Cleveland,

numbered among its promoters many of the same men involved in

the Columbus and Xenia company, including Medary, Sullivant,

the Neils, and the Ridgways.

 

5 "Special Report of the Directors of the Penitentiary, etc.," Ohio Legislative Docu-

ments (Columbus, 1847), Vol. XI, Pt. 1, Doc. No. 46, 650.

6 Cleveland Herald, February 24, 1851.

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262    Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

Columbus had to have railroads, the supporters of public aid

declared, and pointed to the benefits to the taxpayers that rail

service would bring: prices for farm products would rise, manu-

facturing would be stimulated, population would increase, and

many more. It was also argued that rail service would make Co-

lumbus more accessible and hence strengthen its chances of remain-

ing the state capital. That year there had been another revival of

the threat to move the seat of government elsewhere, a threat

fortified by the fact that so little actual work had been done on the

new statehouse.

In the campaigning, the opponents of public aid largely ignored

the line to Cleveland, concentrating their fire on the Columbus and

Xenia Railroad. They denounced most of all the use of taxpayers'

money to reimburse that company for its share of the cost of the

penitentiary railroad's bridge over the Scioto. Just why this point

mattered so much none of the objectors bothered to make clear,

although one surmises they balked at bailing out somebody or

something. Financial impropriety also seems hinted at, but what

it was remains concealed in circumlocutory prose.

The election put Medary, who was back as editor of the Ohio

Statesman, squarely on the spot. He had been one of the earliest

and most enthusiastic supporters of the Columbus and Xenia road

and was also a strong advocate of railroads in general--"the rail-

road movement" it was then called. But as editor of a Democratic

paper he had to follow the party line, to use today's term, which

opposed taxing the people for public aid to railroads and similar

internal improvements. In consequence, although his Ohio States-

man could not give the proposal an editorial blessing, it refrained

from attacking it and even printed a number of letters in its favor.

The Ohio State Journal, a Whig organ, strongly urged an affirm-

ative vote.

When the dust finally settled after the balloting, it was apparent

that any qualms over the relations of the Columbus and Xenia

Railroad and the penitentiary line had been of no moment. The

county voters by better than two to one, and the city voters by

almost four to one showed that they wanted rail service and were

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Ohio's Unsung Penitentiary Railroad          263

 

willing to be taxed for it. Most central Ohio voters at similar

elections elsewhere that spring also favored the iron horse.

The triumph of the railroad supporters was a foretaste of the

better days ahead for Columbus. Things at last were looking up

after the long depression touched off by the panic of 1837. The

Mexican War was giving a lift to business; the first telegraph line

into the city began operation and enabled the Ohio State Journal

and the Ohio Statesman to appear as dailies throughout the year

instead of only when the legislature was in session; the first postage

stamps went on sale. That fall (1847) the Columbus and Xenia

Railroad, which had persuaded the influential Alfred Kelley to be

its head, advertised for bids from contractors; five or six other local

rail projects, most of which would die a-borning, hopefully opened

stock subscription books.

The state's quarry and railroad were doing wonderfully well.

Large quantities of stone were sold to the contractors building the

line to Xenia, stone which, the legislature later complained, should

have been sold to the statehouse commissioners. The commissioners,

it seems, had had to buy stone from other quarries to keep the work

going on the capitol, which had been reauthorized in 1846.

The reply of the penitentiary management is not on record, but

one may assume that it did not fail to point out that it had been

made responsible for producing enough profits from the labor of

the convicts to pay for the quarry, its railroad, the operating

expenses of the institution, and other items besides. The legislature

may have been impressed, but in 1849 it took the quarry, the rail

line, the limekilns, and all related "apparatus" out of the control

of the directors and warden of the penitentiary and put them into

the hands of the statehouse commissioners "for the purpose of

enabling them to procure stone for the said State house with the

greatest economy.^"7 Ridgway, Jr., it will be recalled, was a mem-

ber of both groups.

The little rail line, which its new management chose to call the

state railroad, was extended two thousand feet to reach another

stratum of limestone, but its operations must have been severely

 

7 Ohio General Laws, XLVII (1849), 48.

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264     Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

 

curtailed by an epidemic of cholera. That summer the disease struck

the city, and especially the penitentiary, with great violence and

took the lives of many convicts.

The following summer (1850) the disease broke out again but

the inmates suffered relatively little. One of the directors, however,

the ubiquitous Ridgway, Jr., was a victim. Another was the talented

wife of Sullivant, from whom the state had bought the quarry.

Sullivant later took Ridgway's place as a statehouse commissioner.

Epidemiologists remark on the fact that more than once in those

years an outbreak of disease followed the opening of a new rail

line, as was the case here, for the Columbus and Xenia Railroad

had begun operations a few months earlier.

The arrival in 1850 of this first "real" railroad occurred in the

same year as the introduction of artificial gas light and the holding

of the second Railroad Elections in Columbus and Franklin County.

This time, however, the voters decisively rejected a plan to put

$150,000 more of taxpayers' money into three new rail projects.

The identical plan was resubmitted the following year and beaten

by still greater majorities. Then a new state constitution forbade

subsidies of the sort.

The year of the 1851 Railroad Elections was the year the little

railroad--the state road--really came into its own. From being a

stalking horse and a campaign issue it was now to become a source

of innocent merriment to the people of Columbus. In order to

save carrying the rough blocks of limestone through the city streets

on carts, some of them drawn by oxen, rails were extended from

the tracks of the Columbus and Xenia--over which the quarry cars

could be run across the river and into the city--past the railroad

depot to Third Street, and then south to the capitol in the heart of

the city. The stone was dressed at the latter site by convict labor.

(This was in accord with the plan proposed back in 1844.)

From a source which railroad historians have not yet verified, a

locomotive--to take the place of animals--was obtained and put

into service. Iron rails had by then replaced the earlier wooden

ones. Also still debatable is the locomotive's name. That would be

a matter of no consequence to most people, but to the subdivision

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Ohio's Unsung Penitentiary Railroad              265

 

of ferro-equinologists, whom we may call locomotive genealogists,

the life story of every early engine has a value all its own. Some

day the ancestry of what people in Columbus referred to as "a tea

kettle affair" may come to light.⁸

The locomotive arrived the day of the election, April 7, 1851, to

the accompaniment of a brief mention in Medary's Ohio Statesman:

"The Locomotive for bringing stone from the State quarries, made

its first appearance this morning in the State House yard, and pro-

duced quite a sensation."⁹ A month later the same paper gave the

operation somewhat more attention:

The work of our new State House "goes bravely on" and the building is

beginning to make considerable show. The "Penitentiary Train" rushes in

the rocks with railroad speed, and the workmen in the yard dress and lay

them up, "like a thousand of brick."¹⁰

In a few days the Statesman's Whig competitor, the Ohio State

Journal, joined the fun by printing an alleged letter written in an

imitation of broken French. Headed "Aulentangie River Expose,"

it began:

 

Citizen Sammedarie: Mercredi, 14 Mai, We go to State House Yard,

Aulentangie Depot, three o'clock. We stay dere half hour--cars not go;--

we stay dere hour entiere, and cars not go!--we stay dere hour and a

half-tree quarter-and den cars not go! Den we swear!--par Diable!

Sacre! Mon Dieu! Conducteur see we grow mad; he say, "ascend de cars!"

we ascend. Den de cars leave State House Depot--no cushion, no seat, no

top to de cars! We sit on dirty boards! (Sacre!). Den we grow more mad;

say one imposition! Very damned! and promise to publish Aulentangie

Compagnie in de Journelle!11

And more to the same effect.

This comical account of a ride on the open "stone cars," such as

are found in many a quarry today, was a parody of a letter in a

previous issue of the same paper. Written in broken English by a

 

8 Alfred E. Lee, History of the City of Columbus (2 vols., New York and Chicago,

1892), II, 577.

9 Ohio Statesman, April 7, 1851.

10 Ibid., May 10, 1851.

11 Ohio State Journal, May 16, 1851.

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266     Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

 

party of well-to-do Mexican travelers, it had complained of uncivil

treatment at the Columbus railroad station, where they had had to

change cars en route from Cincinnati to Cleveland. (The line to

Cleveland, for which the voters approved public aid in the 1847

Railroad Elections, had opened a few months before.) Language

difficulties were apparently the source of their trouble, if one may

accept the conductor's explanation, printed the next day.

Use of French as a form of wit and humor was popular at the

time. The word "Aulentangie" was intended to be a French and

hence comic way of writing "Olentangy," the name of the Scioto's

tributary. "Citizen Sammedarie" was a salutation to Samuel Medary,

whose Whig opponents bore down heavily on what they stigmatized

as the radical, the locofoco, the Jacobin tendencies of the Democrats.

The phrase was evidently designed to evoke shades of the French

Revolution as well as of Louis Philippe, the "citizen king," de-

throned in 1848.

Both newspapers relished little squibs about the railroad to the

quarry. A number of church "PicNics" were held in a beautiful

grove on the quarry property, which they reached by the Olentangy

Train, the Statesman reported, adding on one such occasion the

pious sentiment, "We hope they may have an agreeable time of it."

This folksy manner of writing about a quarry worked by convict

labor was soon dropped, but not until the Ohio State Journal had

had the last word:

Among the conveyances to the rural districts in this vicinity, the Olentangy

Railroad must not be forgotten. A ride on the open stone car, in a hot sun,

across the Franklinton fields, makes the cool water in the quarry taste un-

usually refreshing, and makes the shady lawns in the vicinity doubly welcome.

The quarry itself is a great hole in the rocks, from which many big stones

have been taken, and a few more of the same sort are left.¹²

The ramshackle little line to the penitentiary clearly seems to have

engendered, for a time at least, a cozy feeling in the hearts of the

people.

Like its big brothers, the state railroad had its share of accidents.

 

12 Ohio State Journal (weekly edition), June 24, 1851.

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Ohio's Unsung Penitentiary Railroad          267

 

About half a year after it had been put in service the locomotive

was being taken to Cincinnati for repairs when it hit a cow, was

thrown off the tracks, and "entirely demolished." Whether a new

one took its place or whether it was put together again is not

apparent from the records. The next spring a state line train ran

into a gravel train on the Columbus and Xenia, but without serious

consequences. In the fall an accident caused injuries to a worker,

and a few weeks later another accident resulted in a death.

Surgeons' bills for these and other injuries sustained "during the

performance of the locomotive labor" had been presented to them,

the statehouse commissioners declared in their 1852 report to the

legislature. What, they wanted to know, should they do about

them? Subsequent reports gave no answer.

Fire destroyed the old statehouse in 1852, making the speedy

completion of the new one an urgent matter. Faster deliveries

could be expected from the state railroad, now that the limestone

was carried to the building site without trans-shipment at the

Penitentiary. To do this had meant using the Columbus and Xenia

Railroad tracks across the river and into the city, a matter no doubt

easily enough arranged in view of the close relations between the

two carriers. Like the serpents in the statue of Laocoon and his

?ons, it is hard on occasion to distinguish between the two lines,

and particularly hard to trace their routes, at times coinciding and

?t times distinct.

Contemporary maps agree neither as to the number nor location

of the islands in the Scioto; over them the tracks passed, in part

by bridge and in part by what appears to have been a causeway.

Most probably both railroads used the same route and bridge (or

?auseway) from a point slightly west of the river to a switch on

?large island. Thence the state's line crossed over to the peniten-

tiary by its own bridge, and the Columbus and Xenia continued on

by another bridge over a small island to the east bank. To what

??tent their lines were identical between the west bank of the

??cioto and the quarry property is likewise uncertain.

The importance attaching to these details lies in showing how

much use the privately-owned railroad was able to make of the

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268     Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

 

route built by the state--and thereby save itself some construction.

Yet the saving seems much less than the promoters probably hoped

for.

A still more puzzling aspect of the route followed by the state

railroad is this: in some cases it appears to have crossed certain

pieces of property with nothing on record to show that the state

either owned the property or had an easement in it. This applies

to the stretch between the west side of Franklinton and the west

bank of the Scioto, but not, it should be noted, to the quarry

property itself or to the stretch between the quarry and the west

side of Franklinton.

The Columbus and Xenia Railroad was also decidedly casual as

to land holdings until in 1860 it set about regularizing its titles.

It would appear, in short, that sometimes both the state and the

company laid their tracks first and settled with the property owners

later.

The state's locomotive and string of "stone cars" after a few

years of rattling up and down the streets ceased to be a source of

fun to the Columbusites and became a nuisance. When, in 1855,

the statehouse commissioners requested the city to renew its per-

mission to keep the tracks on the streets, they were refused. The

citizens of Third Street had presented a unanimous remonstrance,

complaining grievously of the injury done their property and the

danger to their families because of the railroad. The vote in the

city council being tied, the motion for renewal was lost, an action,

the capitol's architect wrote, which was "induced by entire mis-

apprehension or whim.^"13

The commissioners were doubtless provoked by this lack of co-

operation, but it is unlikely that it worked any great hardship on

their undertaking. Construction of the capitol had so far advanced

that a year and a half later the building was opened for use,

although not until 1861 was it entirely completed.

Not long before the building was first used, the commissioners

had begun to wind up the affairs of their railroad. The legislature

 

13 Annual Report of the State House Commissioners for the Year 1855 (Columbus,

1856), 15.

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Ohio's Unsung Penitentiary Railroad           269

 

ordered them to take down and remove "the old quarry bridge

near the penitentiary," and carefully instructed them to salvage

the iron and timber. The next year the lawmakers authorized the

commissioners to sell their locomotive and convert their iron rails

into a fence around the statehouse. The commissioners duly ad-

vertised the engine for sale but found no buyer. After two years

the legislature ordered the auditor of state to try his hand at selling

it. Since the financial reports of the following years contain several

items showing the sale of scrap iron and no item indicating the sale

of a locomotive, the engine's fate may be guessed at.

Toward the end of the Civil War the "General Government,"

as the United States was referred to, built a hospital for sick and

disabled soldiers on the southern part of the quarry property, near

the beautiful grove where the "PicNics" had been held. After the

war the establishment was turned over to the state of Ohio for a

soldiers' home. Within three years the state vacated the place, and in

due course the buildings were disposed of as surplus material. In

the quarry itself the state is said to have continued using convict

labor until operations there ceased some thirty years ago. Thurber

was living in Columbus about that time.

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