An 1859 Train Ride

Our monastery annals say three sisters arrived from Erie, Pennsylvania on June 3, 1859 to begin the foundation of St. Walburg Monastery. On August 2 Sr. Alexia Lechner with another sister arrived. I have always wondered how these first sisters of our community got here. Our annals do not mention their mode of transportation. 

I had in my fantasy that they came down the Ohio River on riverboat and landed at the Covington Public Landing. That fantasy was dashed when I did some research and found that they would have had to come from Pittsburgh to arrive on riverboat.

I next emailed the current archivist, Sr. Theresa Zoky at Mount St. Benedict Monastery in Erie to ask if she had any information about how the early sisters traveled. She said it was oral tradition in the community that the sisters who went to Covington traveled by train. I started to look at the history of trains in the United States in the mid-19^th century.

Quickly finding that history to be more complicated than I could easily comprehend, I did find a map of US trains in 1859 the Library of Congress. But I didn’t have enough information to make sense of it. I needed to find a train historian. In my Internet search I found the Railroad and Locomotive Society and took a chance and emailed Peter Hansen, the editor of Railroad History. To my atonishment he emailed back within two hours with all kinds of information. He told me to look at the Library of Congress map I had already found at . https://www.loc.gov/item/98688395/ . Then he translated the map for me. He said Mother Alexia’s journey mostly likely would have been:

·         Westward on the Cleveland & Erie Rail Road between its namesake cities.·         The Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad, but only between Cleveland and Columbus; the CC&C wouldn’t reach Cincinnati until 1872.

·         The Columbus & Xenia west to Xenia. (I’m not sure why it’s spelled “Yenia” on the map; it’s probably a typo.) 

·         The Little Miami Railroad from Xenia to Cincinnati.

·         A ferry from Cincinnati to Covington. Although the map shows that the Kentucky Central ran between those two points, it’s important to remember that the Roebling Bridge was the first to span the Ohio River at Cincinnati, and it wasn’t finished until 1866. If the railroad advertised service between Cincinnati and Covington, it would have been on a ferry. So-called car ferries, with railroad tracks laid on their decks, were pretty common everywhere in the country before bridges spanned major rivers. [Who knew?] 

So grateful to have received this wonderful information, I wanted to know more. I wanted to know:

• How long the trip would have taken?
• Were tickets arranged according to class?
• What kind of railroad cars were typical of the time?
• Where would the passengers have gotten food?
• Sleeping arrangements and how the trip would have felt?

Sister Alexia Lechner

Peter’s answers were wonderful. The total train ride would have about 28 hrs. Most likely the sisters were in coach class. The cost of the travel varied and I will have to see if the state historical society has any records. The cars were universally of wood construction. In 1859, ventilation would have come from open windows.  Smoke could indeed blow in through the open windows, but in 1859, almost all locomotives were wood burners, so it wouldn’t have been sooty, as later coal smoke was. There were no automatic “knuckle” couplers of the kind used today; couplings were done with an iron pin inserted through an oblong link connecting the cars. This tended to make the cars jostle a great deal when starting and stopping. Another safety feature, air brakes, hadn’t debuted yet; cars were braked by means of a wheel on the outside platform of the car, which were turned by the brakeman upon a whistle signal from the engineer. It was pretty primitive.

            Budget-minded passengers [as of course the sisters would be] often brought their own food. Dining cars didn’t exist in 1859, but trains did stop at trackside eating houses, most of which were of poor quality. Sleeping cars were pretty basic in 1859, where they ran at all. The passenger got a hard wooden platform to lie down upon, and may or may not have had a mattress, bedding, and curtains. Sleeping cars took a quantum leap forward in the next decade, becoming quite luxurious, more private, and attended by well-trained porters. Such innovations were largely absent in 1859, however. It was considered somewhat disreputable for women to use the sleeping cars — and scandalous if the berths didn’t have curtains, which was often the case in 1859. Both Peter and I wonder if the sisters might have stopped overnight along the way, perhaps at a hotel, a convent, or even a rectory.

            Peter’s final suggestion was to read a book titled Wet Britches and Muddy Boots: A History of Travel in Victorian America, published by Indiana University Press and written by John H. White, Jr., curator emeritus of transportation at the Smithsonian. I haven’t read the book yet.

            I was so pleased to get this information about train travel in 1859 and I owe a great debt to Peter Hansen for cheerfully providing all this information. He gave me the insight I wanted in the experience our sisters had in traveling from Erie, Pennsylvania. Thank you, Peter! My next project will be to see what the city of Covington was like when the sisters arrived.

                                  Sr. Deborah Harmeling, OSB