Glen Rock in the Civil War

Glen Rock in the Civil War. Wartime Along the Railroad. Railroad traffic through Glen Rock soared during the Civil War, with civilian passengers joined by military trains full of troops, supplies, and wounded. The single track through town became so busy that construction of a second line was started in 1861., Some congestion was man-made. On July 26, 1861, a train carrying Massachusetts troops under Col. Fletcher Webster, son of famed statesman Daniel Webster, stopped in Glen Rock. The train had taken 5½ hours to cover the last 25 miles, and Webster suspected the engineer of slowing their progress. He asked Pvt. Nathan Revere, the great-grandson of Paul Revere, to "take charge of the engine," and Revere piloted the train to Baltimore, with "good results in the item of speed.", Sometimes traffic stopped altogether. After the intense fighting at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, the Union army was dangerously low on ammunition. A special four-car resupply train was hurriedly dispatched from Baltimore, and the tracks ahead cleared. On the morning of September 18, the train roared into Glen Rock, pausing just long enough for water and to allow the railcars' smoking, blazing hot journal boxes (axle boxes) to cool, before racing out again., Traffic in Glen Rock paused again in April 1865 to clear the way for the funeral train of Abraham Lincoln. As the black-clothed cars proceeded slowly through town, crowds of people lined the tracks to pay their respects, "profoundly silent spectators of the funeral cortege.", (captions) , Union Col. Fletcher Webster. Webster was mortally wounded at Second Manassas on August 30, 1862. Courtesy Library of Congress, Post War View of Glen Rock. Collection of Robert L. Williams, One of the engines that pulled Lincoln's funeral train. Courtesy Library of Congress