Category: Historic Sites

In view of the interest and importance at the present time of everything which relates to the development of railroading, it is well to remember what has been done in America to lay the foundations of the locomotive industry, and, therefore, we feel that it is desirable to recall the extent to which the design of the modern locomotive is indebted to the work of Joseph Harrison, Jr., although it is now more than thirty years since he passed away. 

–Cassier’s Magazine, November-April 1910

The son of a Philadelphia grocer, Joseph Harrison Jr. (1810-1874) received his early training the old fashioned way: learning-by-doing.  After cutting his teeth as an apprentice machinist, at age 25 Harrison got a job with the locomotive builder Andrew McCalla Eastwick.  While in Eastwick’s employ, Harrison came up with the solution to a problem that had long befuddled early locomotive designers. The first locomotives, such as George Stephens’ “Rocket” of 1829, were propelled by only a single pair of driving wheels.  If engineers could add additional pairs of wheels, the locomotive’s pulling capacity, especially on steep grades, would be greatly increased. But no one seemed to be able to come up with a way to evenly distribute the energy from the steam pistons to more than two driving wheels.

In 1838, Harrison patented his so-called “equalizing lever,” which, according to Cassier’s Magazine, ensured “the equal division of the load upon the two axles.”

Footage of a replica of George Stephenson’s “The Rocket” locomotive of 1829. Note the diagonal pistons that power the single pair of drive wheels. 

This invention made Harrison, and his now-partner Andrew McCalla Eastwick, very much in demand as locomotive designers.  Thanks to Harrison’s equalizing lever, locomotives could now have 4 leading wheels and 4 driving wheels (4-4-0), a configuration known as the “American type.”  By the end of the 19th century, locomotives with  as many as ten driving wheels (known as “decapods”) wold be pulling heavily-loaded freight and passenger cars over the Allegheny Mountains and into the burgeoning interior of the United States. A large percentage of the freight carried by the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroads was coal, which powered the factories and heated the homes of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and other eastern cities.

In 1843, the thirty-three year old Joseph Harrison received a summons from the richest and most powerful man on earth: Czar Nicholas I of Russia (r.1825-1855).  The czar’s mission for Harrison: to design locomotives suited to carry freight and passengers between St. Petersburg and Moscow, a distance of four hundred miles.

Czar Nicholas could not have had a more different upbringing than Harrison’s hardscrabble one. He had been raised in the splendor of the Winter Palace, surrounded by tutors and servants. Nicholas had been taught from a very young age that the Romanov family’s “Divine Right” to rule came directly from God.  Because he was the third son of the erratic Czar Paul I, few thought that Nicholas a chance of becoming the ruler of the largest kingdom on earth. 8.6 million square miles, to be exact.  As a result, he was trained as a military engineer and army officer.  Yet when his eldest brother Alexander I died childless in 1825 and another brother, Constantine, refused the throne shortly after that, Nicholas had no choice but to accept the crown.  After his mother Catherine the Great’s death in 1796, Czar Paul I forbade women from inheriting the throne. Many in Russia, especially reform-minded members of the gentry, feared Nicholas as a reactionary autocrat who sought to undo the liberal reforms of his predecessors.

Almost immediately after Nicholas became Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, a cadre of military officers refused to swear allegiance to the new monarch.  On December 26, 1825, About 3,000 of them assembled in Senate Square, St. Petersburg.  Their plea to the czar: the creation of a constitutional monarchy along the lines of Great Britain’s, complete with an elected, representative body that curbed the absolute power of the czar.

Nicholas I was incensed by this challenge to his authority. He ordered his loyal soldiers to open fire on the demonstrators.  The leaders of the so-called Decembrists were captured and executed. Others were exiled to Siberia.  During the next thirty years, Nicholas attempted to squash all liberal thought from his realm by promulgating a new educational curriculum based on the trinity of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.”  According to his educational minister Sergey Uvarov:

“It is our common obligation to ensure that the education of the people be conducted, according to Supreme intention of our August Monarch, in the joint spirit of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. I am convinced that every professor and teacher, being permeated by one and the same feeling of devotion to the throne and fatherland, will use all his resources to become a worthy tool for the government and to earn its complete confidence.”

In addition to stepping up censorship and the powers of the secret police, the czar embarked on a series of military adventures that alienated Russia’s allies, most notably Great Britain. He also had the 1,500 room Winter Palace rebuilt following its total destruction by fire in 1837. The czar demanded his official residence be restored to its former grandeur within a year. One observer of the project noted: “During the great frosts 6000 workmen were continually employed; of these a considerable number died daily, but the victims were instantly replaced by other champions brought forward to perish.”

Prospects for Russia’s millions of serfs–laboring peasants who were bought, sold and mortgaged by wealthy landowners–were bleak, as well.

Harrison may have heard about Czar Nicholas’s repressive governing tactics, but when presented with such a lucrative business opportunity as the Moscow to St. Petersburg railroad, he could not say no.  In 1843, Harrison and his young family set sail for Russia.  Shortly before doing so, he and Andrew Eastwick sold their firm’s “equalizing lever” patent to Matthias Baldwin, founder of Philadelphia’s Baldwin Locomotive Company, for a tremendous sum of money.

In Russia, Harrison not only showed the czar how to run a railroad, but also would also dream up his own palace back in Philadelphia, one that would have fit right along side the shimmering pastel confections lining the canals of St. Petersburg.

Sources: 

“Joseph Harrison Jr. A Biographical Sketch,” Cassier’s Magazine, An Engineering Monthly, Volume XXXVII, November 1909-April 1910, http://himedo.net/TheHopkinThomasProject/TimeLine/Philadelphia/LocomotiveWorks/CassierBioJosHarrison.htm, accessed April 17, 2018.

Joseph Harrison Jr. Papers, MS.024, Hoang Tran, ed., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, January 2016. https://www.pafa.org/sites/default/files/media-assets/MS.024_JosephHarrisonJr.pdf, accessed April 17, 2018.

Richard Mowbray Hayward, Russia Enters the Railway Age, 1842-1855 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs), 1998, pp.42-47. 

Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University), 2001, p. 146.

Excerpt from “The Wound-Dresser” by Walt Whitman

Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in,
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground,
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital,
To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return,
To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,
An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,
Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.

Nowadays, it is the Saturday farmers’ market draws crowds to verdant Clark Park, the heart of West Philadelphia’s Spruce Hill neighborhood.  Yet only a few short steps from the stands displaying pink heirloom tomatoes and canned Amish chowchow is a large chunk of rock pulled from the Gettysburg battlefield.

It is the only reminder of what stood here a century-and-a-half ago: America’s largest Civil War military hospital. During the worst years of fighting, over 5,000 wounded soliders lived here, many suffering from debilitating, horrendous injuries.

According to the late historian Shelby Foote, the reason for the high casualties during the Civil War was that the cutting-edge weapons of industrial warfare were far ahead of the generals’ Napoleonic tactics.  Massed infantry charges met with very accurate, withering fire from the newfangled rifled musket and heavy artillery. When using a rifled musket when paired with the conical Minie ball, a soldier could kill an enemy at half-a-mile.  After a major battle, the statistics printed in Northern and Southern newspapers were so vast as to be almost minded numbing.  At the 1862 Battle of Antietam, for example, an estimated 87,000 Union soldiers under the leadership of Philadelphia-born General George B. McClellan faced off against 37,000 Confederates under the command of General Robert E. Lee.  September 17, 1862 remains the bloodiest day in American military history: 3,600 men killed, 17,000 wounded, and 1,800 captured or missing on the banks of a creek in rural Maryland.

The Battle of Gettysburg, which took place 10 months after Antietam, ended with a decisive Union victory, but there were over 50,000 casualties on both sides over three hot July days.  At the same time, General U.S. Grant captured the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, opening up the Mississippi River to Union naval traffic and cutting the Confederacy in two. Yet many Northerners did not herald General U.S. Grant as a hero.  First Lady Mary Lincoln derided him as “Butcher Grant.” In response, President Lincoln said, “I can’t spare this man. He fights.”

Where did these thousands of “wounded” men go?  Some recovered from relatively minor injuries, and then donned their uniforms again to fight another day.  But then there were the amputees, whose shattered legs and arms were sawn off in makeshift battlefield hospitals.  In the days before sterilization, Army surgeons would reuse the same blood-soaked saws again and again.  For the poor patient, the only anesthesia was a slug of whiskey. Infection ran rampant. And then there were men whose faces had been gruesomely disfigured.  They were missing eyes, ears, even parts of their jaws.  Many of them ended up addicted to the opium-based drugs that doctors freely distributed to them to alleviate their intense physical and psychological pain.

Philadelphia in the mid-19th century was arguably the preeminent American medical city.  The University of Pennsylvania, still located at 8th and Chestnut, was more famous for its medical school and teaching hospital than its undergraduate programs. Due to its relatively close proximity to the killing fields of Virginia, not to mention its large and well-trained medical community, Philadelphia was a logical place for a new hospital for convalescing veterans.   In 1862, Surgeon-General William Alexander Hammond appointed Philadelphia physician Isaac Israel Hayes to construct a new Army hospital on 15 acres in then-rural West Philadelphia.  The setting was woodsy and pastoral, and Washington’s Army brass hoped that the clean country air of the Philadelphia suburbs would not only hasten the soldiers’ recovery, but also uplift their spirits.

Hayes was a natural choice. Not only was he an esteemed physician, but a brilliant planner.  After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1853, the young Quaker signed on as ship’s surgeon in one of many expeditions in search of lost British explorer Sir John Franklin, and on a later Arctic expedition allegedly became the first European to tread the shores of Ellesmere Island.   The logistics of planning a 4,500-bed hospital from scratch, and in a hurry, dwarfed even those of planning a multi-year Arctic expedition, but Hayes was not deterred.  He put pen to paper and laid out a temporary city of canvas tents and wood structures on the site.  It was later calculated that that at its peak, Satterlee consumed 800,000 pounds of bread, 16,000 pounds of butter and 334,000 quarts of milk per year, all of which had to be brought in by horse-and-wagon on muddy, rutted Baltimore Pike.

For Hayes, who had just returned from the Arctic, being thrown into the bloody cauldron of the Civil War was a rude awakening, as he had been away from America for so much of his adult life.  His years of sailing through fields of icebergs in search of Franklin and the Northwest Passage were as if “set down in a dream.”

To augment the ranks of professional physicians, Hayes partnered with the Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity, who would live in an adjacent convent.   Twenty or so nuns would change the bed sheets, empty the chamber pots, dress festering wounds, and most importantly, offer emotional solace to those lonely men in agony, far from home and loved ones.  According to biographer Douglas W. Wamsley, Dr. Hayes instructed the medical staff to do whatever it took to avoid amputations, thus keeping the soldiers’ bodies whole.  Given the lack of sterilization, this policy might have actually prevented deaths from infection.

Walt Whitman’s poem: “The Wound-Dresser.” Whitman served as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War.

Sources: 

Faith Charlton, “1832 Cholera Outbreak in Philadelphia and Duffy’s Cut,” PAHRC, Sisters of Charity, http://www.pahrc.net/tag/sisters-of-charity/, accessed November 1, 2016.

Albin J. Kowalewski, “The Civil War’s Rip Van Winkle,” The New York Times, April 29, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/albin-j-kowalewski/, accessed November 1, 2012.

“U.S. Grant (transcript),” The American Experience, WGBH, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/grant-transcript/?flavour=mobile, accessed November 1, 2016.

“The Civil War’s Satterlee Hospital,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 25, 2013. http://www.philly.com/philly/video/inquirer/20130625_NDN_INQUIRER_Civil_War_s_Satterlee_Hospital.html, accessed November 1, 2016.

“U.S. Grant,” The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/presidents/ulyssessgrant, accessed November 1, 2016.