Nashville now and then: Off the rails

The streetcar boycott of 1905 and the Dutchman's Curve rail disaster of 1918 each loomed large this week in our city's history
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Email | Print By E. Thomas Wood

The Nashville Tennessean's front page from the morning after the great train wreck of 1918. A high-resolution pdf version (10 megabytes) is available at this link. And Rex Hammock has posted images of the site as it stands today.

Voting with one's feet

The streetcar companies didn't actually want segregation. It would cost money to maintain, they said. There was no pressing need for it. And some drivers were threatening to quit rather than "discriminate against colored people." But the General Assembly, displaying its usual wisdom, decreed that all public transportation must be segregated — effective this week in 1905, right after the Fourth of July.

"The self-respecting, intelligent colored citizens of Nashville" would not stand for this insult, a local preacher proclaimed. They would "trim their corns, darn their socks, wear solid shoes and walk," a black newspaper defiantly announced.

The streetcar boycott commenced as soon as the new rules went into effect, and a group of black businessmen would soon back it up by starting the Union Transportation Co., an alternative mass-transit line.

But the streetcar venture went downhill in a hurry; or, more precisely, the defective vehicles that it purchased failed to go uphill. To compound matters, its white-owned competitor, which had the only generator in town to recharge streetcar batteries, sabotaged Union's cars during recharging. In a final blow, the city assessed a hefty "privilege tax" on each car, crushing the company.

The boycott would end within a few months. But a later generation of African-Americans would learn from its example. There would be other boycotts in other places and times, like Montgomery, Ala. in 1955, with enduring results.

[Lena R. Marbury, Nashville's 1905 Streetcar Boycott (Master's thesis, Tennessee State University, 1985); Don Doyle, Nashville in the New South: 1880-1930 (University of Tennessee Press, 1985)]

A fateful convergence

On July 9, 1918, more than a hundred business people, soldiers, war-industry workers and others were killed, and many others grievously injured, when two passenger trains collided head-on at Dutchman's Curve, near where White Bridge Road crosses the tracks. To this day, the crash remains the worst railroad accident in American history.

The best retelling of the tale of the tragic trains is the 80th-anniversary story Mike Kilen wrote for The Tennessean in 1998. It covers, among other details, the role of settlement money after the accident in helping to fund the establishment of Nashville's Third National Bank.

The Richland Creek Greenway now passes the site, and a Metro historical marker has been approved but not funded. Organizers of the effort to establish the marker have set up this web site and are seeking to raise private contributions to cover its cost.

A commemoration ceremony will take place on Monday morning, July 9, starting at 9 a.m. at the entrance to the Greenway and continuing on to Mount Olivet Cemetery. Descendants of victims, survivors and rescue workers are to pay respects at the graves of the trains' two engineers.

Addendum, July 8: The full text of local newspaper reports on the crash is now available at this link.