A Roundhouse Crew

The crew of railroad roundhouse workers took a break one day to pose for a group photo. The print was found in an antique store outside of Chicago, Ill, so presumably it was taken at one of the several area roundhouses.

Building the Pittsburg Shops

Original, faded condition

The Kansas City Southern Railroad picked Pittsburg, Kansas as the home for their large maintenance facility, known in railroad parlance as "The Shops". One of the buildings that was central to the operation was this one, where the line's steam locomotives would be overhauled and repaired. The faint notation at the bottom of the photo indicates that the workers building this place were taking their break on March 22, 1907. These men's hard work would last well over a century: Although it had been abandoned a number of years before, it was not until the summer of 2010 that this and the other associated buildings were torn down.

When Arthur Stillwell founded the KCS in 1887, he had plotted the line's route from Kansas City to Port Arthur, Texas, he pretty much drew a straight line on the map. That line did not go through Pittsburg, although it wasn't that far away. Pittsburg already had three railroads passing through the town, but it also had an economically aggressive town leadership, headed by founding father Franklin Playter, who offered Stillwell a deal: shift the line so that it passed through the town, and the town government would help with the additional needed right-of-way. Playter then upped the ante, and asked Stillwell to appoint the town as a division point, and build its shops there, with the town helping to subsidize that as well. Stillwell agreed to this as well. When the tracks finally arrived in Pittsburg in 1893, the line was then know as the Kansas City, Pittsburg and Gulf Railroad, and for years after, the sprawling facility was known simply as the P&G Shops.

Fifty years later, the Shops had grown to cover over 100 acres, with the rail yard covering another two hundred, and were a huge economic engine for the city and region for years.

The website Pittsburg Memories has extensive maps and photo documentation of the shops, including interior views of the building in our photo once it had been completed. This map shows our building on the upper right. The view of our photo is looking at the upper left corner of the building as it's shown on the map. A corresponding aerial photo can be seen here.

Times change, however, and with the advent of interstate highways and the robust trucking industry, the freight that supported railroads became less local and more point-to-point. Eventually, KCS decided that it was just not economical to maintain two large shops operations, and so most of the repair activity from Pittsburg was relocated to the KCS shops in Shreveport LA. The buildings then sat idle for a number of years, becoming a magnet for vandals. In June, 2010, the three-month process of demolishing this once-bustling economic center began.

In the Lumberjack's Camp

I found this photo buried in an old box in the dim reaches of a run-down antique store in Norfolk Virginia: think Sanford and Son, here, but not so brightly lit, and definitely more cavernous. Price: $1. This appears to be an albumen print, and I'm guessing it is from the late 1800s, based on several clues.

Here's the full artifact; note that the edges of the actual print are crookedly cut.

Below, I've enhanced the image somewhat, tweaking the contrast and tone-mapping a bit to bring out some of the detail hidden in the fadedness of the print.

The bits of snow on the ground and the lack of leaves suggest a winter-ish or maybe spring scene, but one not so cold as to require heavy coats.

I've cropped the individual men so that you can open these images at a higher resolution, just in case anyone might actually recognize one of these fellows.

Three of the men have full felling axes, which supports the idea of a late 19th century date, when felling axes were used predominantly, and before two-man crosscut felling saws came into popular use. The presence of a grinding stone supports the idea that these are lumberjacks, in that cross-cut felling axes would need frequent sharpening to be as efficient as possible, and because their purpose was to cut across the grain of the wood (as compared to a splitting axe), sharpness was much more critical to professional lumberjacks who would be swinging their axes all day long..

The fourth man is holding one end of a two-man bucking saw, used for cutting up downed timber; bucking saws had a much narrower blade than felling saws.

Behind him appears to be the camp cook holding a basin, and just inside the tent one can just make out a stove with a coffee pot on it. Most of the cooking, though, would likely have been done on the wood-burning stove at the far right of the photo. The tent's stove and stove pipebehind the cook, suggest a kind of permanency to this camp that wouldn't be seen in the camps of other mountain men who move from site to site more frequently.

Lumberjacks lived a fairly solitary and migratory life, and women were seldom to be found in lumber camps. The industry peaked in America in 1906, when there were a half-million lumberjacks working in the forests across the country.