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Chattanooga's Transportation Heritage
Chattanooga's Transportation Heritage
Chattanooga's Transportation Heritage
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Chattanooga's Transportation Heritage

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Chattanooga’s 138-year public transportation heritage is a complex and colorful conglomeration of some 32 companies that were initially comprised of horse-drawn streetcar lines. They were later upgraded to electric traction operations, steam dummy lines, and finally to the motor-coach buses of today. Chattanooga’s transit story has been unique from its inception. Few cities have had any connection to the incline railways that were constructed in this mountainous city, one of which, the famous Lookout Mountain Incline Railway, is still in daily operation. Today’s CARTA transit system has innovated one of the largest fleets of battery-operated electric buses, which other transit companies use as their model for comparison.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 4, 2013
ISBN9781439643921
Chattanooga's Transportation Heritage
Author

David H. Steinberg

David H. Steinberg has been an ardent transit and traction enthusiast since childhood. For 11 years, he operated the authentic New Orleans streetcar that still circumvents the Chattanooga Choo Choo vacation complex. For the past 60 years, he has collected everything he could find on Chattanooga�s local transit development, including some 2,000 photographs. The fruits of his labors are vividly portrayed in the story assembled here to share with others.

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    Chattanooga's Transportation Heritage - David H. Steinberg

    Library.

    INTRODUCTION

    When one looks at available Chattanooga photographs for 1875, they depict the main thoroughfare of Market Street as an unpaved street that required stepping stones to enable one to cross to the other side in the event of inclement weather. They also show rows of retail stores on either side of the street that, with a few exceptions, resemble what in our day would only be called hovels. Yet the small town of around 7,500 souls took on metropolitan airs on September 4 of that year, when it joined other larger towns with its miniscule 15-block horsecar line. It had taken a lot of courage to invest in such an undertaking, and initially it was indeed not a success. It eventually, however, led to a rail system of some 100 miles that through metamorphosis advanced from the original horsecars to steam dummies, electric traction, and, in Chattanooga’s instance, inclines and local railroad lines up to the motor coaches.

    Railroads made Chattanooga what it is today. These railroads introduced people to the city, but they also brought with them war and devastation during the Civil War strife. With hostilities stilled, the railroads now introduced those who had discovered the area’s inert natural beauty, and Chattanooga was soon growing by leaps and bounds. Several false starts were had in 1867 and 1872 to get a street railway in motion, but when A.J. Harris came to town from Atlanta, he was able to get the project off the ground and his Chattanooga Street Railroad Company was in formal operation on September 4, 1875. Harris’s initial street railway was indeed a failure, but when Joshua H. Warner, a local banker took the reins, Warner, who can surely be titled the father of public transportation in Chattanooga, stabilized the company and it was on its way to success.

    Everyone who came to Chattanooga wanted to visit beautiful Lookout Mountain. Thus, Warner’s initial interest was to extend the car line the three miles distance. Slowly, in piecemeal fashion, his line crept toward its goal, and when the first incline railway was readied to the peak on March 21, 1887, his St. Elmo horsecar line had already been brought to its St. Elmo destination by the end of the December before. In quick succession, a series of other lines were soon operating. The East Ninth Street line was partially in use by late November 1886; the Carter Street line went into service on March 25, 1887; the McCallie Avenue branch via Palmetto Street opened simultaneously with the Vine Street line as far as Douglas Street on May 5th of that year; and the full extension to the East Ninth Street line to Chattanooga National Cemetery was in use late May 1887. The Vine Street line was completed its full length to the Hebrew Cemetery on June 22, 1887; the West Ninth and Grove line commenced on September 7, 1888; and what was destined to be the last horsecar extension was the short but strategic branch line from the St. Elmo line at today’s Thirty-eighth Street west to the base station of Lookout Incline No. 1.

    The 1880s were especially boom years for Chattanooga, years that produced foundries, factories, and mills manufacturing all sorts of merchandise that by the turn of the century earned Chattanooga the title Dynamo of Dixie. With increasing population, Chattanooga advanced from a village to a large town that was spreading out in all directions, with the trolley lines not far behind and indeed in several instances ahead of these suburban areas’ establishments.

    One example of this was the separate Chattanooga Electric Railroad Company, the brainchild of Chattanoogans Charles A. Lyerly, Ed Watkins, and Sam W. Divine. When their Highland Park Land Company failed to find anyone interested in providing trolley service to their newly proposed eastern suburb, they chartered the trolley line and on July 1, 1889, commenced Chattanooga’s first electrified service. Just 15 days thereafter, this company purchased the Mission Ridge Railroad Company that operated Forney-type locomotives from the eastern end of the Highland Park Land Company’s property to the summit of nearby Missionary Ridge and electrified it. Just 12 days after that, on July 27, for $450,000, the original Chattanooga Street Railroad Company was secured and a blitz campaign was under way to blanket the city with extended existing horsecar lines, with eventual plans of electrifying them, as well as the building of new electric lines into areas heretofore not serviced by the horsecars. The Highland Park line was soon brought south along Dodds Avenue to Fort Cheatham at today’s Twenty-third Street and Dodds Avenue on September 13, 1889; on October 2, the new Montgomery Avenue (today’s Main Street) line opened as far as East End Avenue (today’s Central Avenue) at National Cemetery, and the Boyce Street (Chestnut Street today) line was opened on May 6, 1890. By the summer of 1890, the St. Elmo line to Lookout Mountain had been electrified, a line down Harrison Avenue (East Third today) was in the process, and the Montgomery Avenue route was completed farther east along George Street (today’s East Fourteenth) from National Cemetery to connect to the existing Dodds Avenue line. By that time, the Chattanooga Electric Railroad was hauling some 2.5 million passengers annually. On August 8, 1891, the streetcars that had initially used Broad Street for egress and ingress of the downtown area switched over to the busier Market Street corridor where a double-track line had been installed, and at that same time, a line via East Ninth from Market to Georgia Avenue to Mott Street (East Fourth today) was being readied for the projected Harrison Avenue extension into Sherman Heights. With Chattanooga now served by more than 34 miles of electric trackage, the last horsecar made its final regularly scheduled run on August 11, 1891. There, the two mules were unharnessed and, in the company of 13 others, were dispatched to the west side of Lookout Mountain in Wauhatchie to live out the remainder of their lives. Despite the devastating year of 1893, with its ensuing financial panic, and the labor troubles in 1899, the company (renamed the Chattanooga Electric Railway since January

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