Mount Clare Shops

Mount Clare Shops. Nerve Center of "Lincoln's Railroad". , The Mount Clare shops of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in front of you, built in the 1830s, were part of the B&O Railroad's nerve center during the Civil War, and the rail system was vital to Union victory. Imagine the shops shrouded in the steam of puffing engines, and the constant clatter of troops and hundreds of railroad workers as soldiers left from here to go to the front lines, and vital foodstuffs and weapons were loaded on cars and sent to fuel the Union's war effort., The B&O's tracks extended south to Washington, D.C., and west to the Ohio River across Maryland and West Virginia, the front line of Union territory. The B&O Railroad President at the time, John Work Garrett, collaborated so closely with President Abraham Lincoln that the B&O Railroad was nicknamed Lincoln's Railroad. Garrett and the B&O also worked closely with the U.S. Army's United States Military Railroad (USMRR) to coordinate the Union railroad war effort. In the seven weeks following the end of the war, some 206,000 Union troops returned home on the B&O Railroad., [Sidebar:] , Federal Employees , The USMRR hired 10,000 free and formerly enslaved Black workmen. That was the first instance of the federal government paying African Americans for their work. Fore information about the museum's Civil War era collection, visit borail.org/civilwar., [Captions:] , One of the B&O's powerful steam locomotives that saw Civil War service. The Memnon came under fire several times and is on display in the museum., The B&O Railroad, highlighted in yellow, was vital for shipping Union troops and supplies between the Eastern and Western Theaters., A B&O train on a Bollman Bridge in the late 1850s. The Mount Clare shops were expanded with an ironworks in the 1850s that allowed the B&O to develop Bollman Bridges, the first iron railroad spans in the United States., USMRR workers repair sabotaged train tracks in 1862.