Been Working on the Railroad

Been Working on the Railroad. . , Folksong: Been Working on the Railroad , By 1840, the Western and Atlantic Railroad started building rail operations locally. The train depot was completed in 1854. Historians document that hundreds of enslaved persons were both owned and leased by the W&A during its formative years. By the 1860s the entire South used this practice to build the third leading railroad miles in the world. Labor contracts to buy or hire enslaved "hands" to line tracks or aid operptions, existed in "groups of hundreds.", These practices were precluded for freedman citizens after ratification of the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865. Involuntary servitude could only operate as punishment for a duly convicted crime. By December 1866, the Cartersville and Van Wert Railroad was covered by a Georgia Legislative Act vehicl allowed "employment of state convicts without costs other than sustenance." Various forms of convict leasing practices were used locally and throughout the South for decades., Conversely, post-war railroads also offered new skilled industrial jobs, with better income, than farm sharecropping. Wofford families of both races "worked on the railroad" locally for more than fifty years., In 1888, news reports lauded Noah Wofford for 22 years of train depot service. Nearly a century later, his grandson Charlie Wofford received a railroad pension until his death in 1975. Yet these opportunities declined during the periods of Jim Crow and segregation, when the best skilled railroad jobs were taken from African Americans., Eventually, southern railroads assumed critical importance both regionally and nationally. Railroads entered the imaginations of both the soul and the arts, as with the folk story of railroad worker John Henry, or the works songs of Gandy Men who "lined" railroad tracks, or the blues song by Lead Belly, "Take Dis Hammer". In the 20th century, footsteps crowded train depots as the Great Migration saw 7 million Southerners seek more social and economic freedom. In 1918, the train depot saw Moses Chambers appeal his conviction and chain gang sentence for daring to share the news of better jobs elsewhere., Yet the call of the homeplace still beckoned, as many Northerners loved southern summers among relatives and rural cultures. Railroad laborers gave subsequent generations the mobile freedoms that many never saw in their lifetimes., Storytelling: Praise from Stockholm, Sweden , In 1993, the Swedish Academy in Stockholm bestowed the Nobel Prize in Literature upon American writer Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality [...] Toni Morrison was born into a working class family in Lorain, Ohio. She read a lot as a child, and her father's stories, taken from the African-American tradition, later became an element in her own writing.", Toni's father was George Wofford, a native of Cartersville. For decades, many Wofford ancestors labored in railroad related occupations. George migrated north shortly after his mother Carrie Morgan died in 1924. Yet he returned south every year to visit relatives, going back home like a mythical Sankofa bird., Toni visited Cartersville in 1998, with attendees of the Toni Morrison Society, holding its first national conference in Atlanta. She was hosted by Dr. Susie Wheeler and Justice Robert Benham. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Morrison noted that a personal highlight of the conference occurred Saturday when she accompanied a group on a tour of Cartersville where her father was born. She even pocketed dirt from his Gilmer Street house., (Captions) , 1910 image of the Historic Cartersville Train Depot, built in 1854. Housed the Western and Atlantic Railroad. Photo Credit: Bartow History Museum Archives, Gandy Men, 1990. Oil on canvas, 47 X98" Artist: Jonathan Green. Credit: Heart of Dixie RR Museum and the William A. Boone Memorial Library, Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate, at Cartersville. Photo credit: The Daily Tribune News , Chloe Wofford (Toni Morrison) with her parents, George and Ramah Wofford. George Wofford was born and raised in Cartersville, Georgia. Photo credit: Lorain Public Library, Seeing her father's home in Cartersville for the first time. Toni Morrison, 1998. Photo Credit: Pearl McHaney, Oliver Cotton (far left) worked as a porter in the 1920s and 1930s, on the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railway (NC and St. L) line at the Cartersvlle Train Depot. Photo Credit Bartow History Museum