The Fredericksburg Railroad. (original) (raw)

Fredericksburg waited 30 years for the railroad, but when the train arrived it was a day late and a dollar short.

In the late nineteenth century Fredericksburg was an isolated community. It was 75 miles of bad roads, steep hills, and low water crossings to Austin or San Antonio. It took a week or more for a freight wagon to make a run to San Antonio and back.

What this town needed was a railroad.

In the 1880s a group of local businessmen, led by Bank of Fredericksburg president Temple D. Smith, began a campaign to build a railroad from a junction near Comfort to Fredericksburg - a distance of 24 miles. Other men on the railroad committee included Charles Nimitz, August Cameron, Oscar Krauskopf, L. F. Kneese, and Adolph Lucas. A. W. Moursund of Blanco County served as legal counsel.

Because railroads were not cheap, the committee needed investors with deep pockets. A group of Chicago businessmen, including General Grant's son Frederick, was briefly interested in the project, but it never got off the ground.

For 25 years the committee considered at least 30 deals from 20 different promoters, but the problem was always the same. Engineers believed the hills were too high to ever get the railroad to Fredericksburg.

Then in 1911 Temple Smith met a former shoe salesman from Kansas City named R. A. Love. Mr. Love dreamed big and talked fast, but he knew how to get things done. He made people believe he could move mountains. He organized a group of San Antonio investors and made his pitch to the railroad committee. In a few days the deal was struck.

Months of hard work lay ahead. The main barrier was the "big hill" just inside the Gillespie County line. The hill was a high limestone ridge that separated the Pedernales Valley from the Guadalupe River watershed.

And there was no way around it or over it. The railroad had to go through it.

For four months workers chipped and blasted away at both ends of the big hill, and by the end of October the 903 foot tunnel was finished.