38th Annual Great Locomotive Chase Festival

Where I live in Adairsville they are having the 38th Annual Great Locomotive Chase Festival this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. They will have craft booths, food booths, amusement rides, singers, dancers, a parade, plays or reenactments, story tellers and a fireworks show. There is a really cool story that goes along with this festival, it is a true one but very long so I am going to put it on my blog in about 3 parts starting tonight and finishing over the next few days of the festival.

The story starts if your from Adairsville you've heard the story, I hadn't until I read it tonight but then again I'm not from Adairsville, I just moved here 6 months ago but the story goes something like this. Spy steals train; conductor chases train; train stops; conductor catches spy, saves train. That's the short version, they tell the longer version in the paper if your interested read on.

This guy James J. Andrews was originally from Hancock County, West Virginia. Well he had a big falling out with his family and moved to Kentucky. He wanted to get a job as a school teacher but no work like that could be found so he became a house and ornamental painter and was very skilled at it. He also had a very fine singing voice and began to teach singing classes in the evenings. He was well educated, had a refined way about him, was considered very handsome and seemed to have a knack for gaining the confidence and respect of everyone around him. This last trait would serve him well in his roll as a master spy.

As the Civil War came, Kentucky did not succeed as the southern states had, nor would they declare conclusively for the union army in the conflict. But they raised an armed militia for their own protection. Andrews was a very strong Unionist and when the war brought a temporary end to the house painting business Andrews offered his services to the Union Army and his offer was accepted. He became a contraband runner at first. And it was in doing this that gave him the greatest, and most terrible idea he had ever had.

The Western and Atlantic Railroad ran from Atlanta to Chattanooga. It was a vital supply and communication pipeline for the Confederacy. The Union Army was marching toward northern Alabama intent on capturing Huntsville, and then moving on to Chattanooga but the railroad could bring hundreds of reinforcements from Georgia to Chattanooga in a matter of hours. Therefore the railroad had to be stopped!! In March of 1862, Andrews and eight soldiers from General Buell's brigade penetrated the southern defenses as far as Atlanta with the mission of stealing a train and destroying the railroad. Andrews had made friends with a Union sympathizer in Atlanta who worked as an engineer on the railroad and who had agreed to drive the stolen train but when the big day came, Andrews couldn't find his friend anywhere and discovered he had been drafted into the Confederate Army. The mission was abandoned and everybody went home.

Immediately upon arriving back in the Union lines, Andrews approached General O. M. Mitchel with the same idea, except this time he would carry more men and include those with railroad experience. He chose twenty-three men to go. Among them were three engineers and a fireman. Less than twenty-four hours after reporting the first raid a failure, he was ready to make another attempt at destroying the W & A. Wait a minute. Did I just say twenty-three men??? That's right, twenty-three. OK you say, I thought there were only nineteen, what happened to the other four? Read tomorrow to see.