Charity Vogel
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801449086
- eISBN:
- 9780801469763
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801449086.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
On December 18, 1867, an eastbound New York Express train derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York. The last two ...
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On December 18, 1867, an eastbound New York Express train derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York. The last two cars of the express train were pitched completely off the tracks and plummeted into the creek bed below. When they struck bottom, one of the wrecked cars was immediately engulfed in flames as the heating stoves in the coach spilled out coals and ignited its wooden timbers. The other car was badly smashed. About fifty people died at the bottom of the gorge or shortly thereafter, and dozens more were injured. The next day and in the weeks that followed, newspapers across the country carried news of the “Angola Horror,” one of the deadliest railroad accidents to that point in U.S. history. This book tells the gripping story of the train crash and the characters involved in the tragedy. It weaves together the stories of the people caught up in the disaster, the facts of the New York Express's fateful run, the fiery scenes in the creek ravine, and the subsequent legal, legislative, and journalistic search for answers to the question: what had happened at Angola, and why? The book sets the Angola Horror against a broader context of the developing technology of railroads, the culture of the nation's print media, the public policy legislation of the post-Civil War era, and the culture of death and mourning in the Victorian period.Less
On December 18, 1867, an eastbound New York Express train derailed as it approached the high truss bridge over Big Sister Creek, just east of the small settlement of Angola, New York. The last two cars of the express train were pitched completely off the tracks and plummeted into the creek bed below. When they struck bottom, one of the wrecked cars was immediately engulfed in flames as the heating stoves in the coach spilled out coals and ignited its wooden timbers. The other car was badly smashed. About fifty people died at the bottom of the gorge or shortly thereafter, and dozens more were injured. The next day and in the weeks that followed, newspapers across the country carried news of the “Angola Horror,” one of the deadliest railroad accidents to that point in U.S. history. This book tells the gripping story of the train crash and the characters involved in the tragedy. It weaves together the stories of the people caught up in the disaster, the facts of the New York Express's fateful run, the fiery scenes in the creek ravine, and the subsequent legal, legislative, and journalistic search for answers to the question: what had happened at Angola, and why? The book sets the Angola Horror against a broader context of the developing technology of railroads, the culture of the nation's print media, the public policy legislation of the post-Civil War era, and the culture of death and mourning in the Victorian period.
Daniel B. Rood
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190655266
- eISBN:
- 9780190655297
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190655266.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, American History: 19th Century
This chapter tells the story of Tredegar Ironworks, a slave-exploiting Richmond firm that facilitated the modernization of Cuba’s sugar economy by providing railroad hardware, machinery, and ...
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This chapter tells the story of Tredegar Ironworks, a slave-exploiting Richmond firm that facilitated the modernization of Cuba’s sugar economy by providing railroad hardware, machinery, and expertise to companies on the island. Tredegar substantially transformed its own factories to meet the needs of Cuban railroad companies, thus providing another instance of “technological entanglement” within the Greater Caribbean. Southern engineers who traveled to the island to install the hardware played up the experience they had gained in coercing slaves on Virginia railroads. Slaves performed key jobs on both ends of the commodity chain: enslaved railroad operatives in Cuba provided daily information on the condition of the hardware; in Richmond, skilled ironworkers helped engineer new products and processes especially suited for the “tropical” railroad market, which was really only Cuba and Brazil at the time. In each locale, whites’ discomfort with enslaved knowledge was outweighed by firms’ need for black workers’ skills.Less
This chapter tells the story of Tredegar Ironworks, a slave-exploiting Richmond firm that facilitated the modernization of Cuba’s sugar economy by providing railroad hardware, machinery, and expertise to companies on the island. Tredegar substantially transformed its own factories to meet the needs of Cuban railroad companies, thus providing another instance of “technological entanglement” within the Greater Caribbean. Southern engineers who traveled to the island to install the hardware played up the experience they had gained in coercing slaves on Virginia railroads. Slaves performed key jobs on both ends of the commodity chain: enslaved railroad operatives in Cuba provided daily information on the condition of the hardware; in Richmond, skilled ironworkers helped engineer new products and processes especially suited for the “tropical” railroad market, which was really only Cuba and Brazil at the time. In each locale, whites’ discomfort with enslaved knowledge was outweighed by firms’ need for black workers’ skills.
