Find us on Facebook RAILROAD DINING, ART, AND CULTURE IN REVIEW BY JAMES D. PORTERFIELD Ubiquitous?
MENTION HAS BEEN MADE here recently, al- most frequently one could say, of continuing additions being made to the railroad cook- book bookshelf. Now comes one devoted to a unique, in my experience at least, source. Yet if railroad fiction and other accounts of the railroad life throughout time are accurate, it is a source that allows the use one of my favorite words: Ubiquitous. As in, “the ubiq- uitous railroad boarding house.”
From Rivets
and Rails: Reci- pes of a Railroad Boarding House Cookbook (Es- semkay, 2012), by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger, briefly recounts the work of the author’s wid- owed great grand- mother, Elizabeth Shade Kennedy, a railroad widow, who ran a boarding house for railroad- ers in Avis, Pa.,
(New York Central country). It then provides recipes for dozens of the elder Ms. Kennedy’s offerings for hungry railroaders. The foods range from beverages — many of which are yeast wines — to medicinals, and cover every other course in between. Enhancing your un- derstanding of the environment, a number of interesting sidebars provide insight into such things as, “Why use the ‘white’ of an egg?” in making wine, to comments on kitchen help- ers who also contributed recipes to Elizabeth Shade Kennedy’s repertoire. The book is available from
amazon.com, and from local independent booksellers as well. Where This Discovery Led: Ms. Kenne-
dy Wenger’s book got me to wondering about the railroad boarding house of old. It was a common feature anywhere trainmen, who have always had lifestyle-altering working conditions, wound up in any number. Yet other than a mention of their existence, one seldom gains insight into them as a setting. To correct that, I spent a pleasant day recent- ly rummaging around in NewspaperArchive. com, a newspaper database. Its home page boasts that it offers “400 years of papers” and “2.02+ billion articles.” An “advanced search” for the exact phrase “railroad boarding house” proved those claims by yielding 608 matches for U.S. newspapers alone. I settled in for an- other fun day of time travel. Wellington, Washington: The lead story
has to be that of the half-mile wide avalanche that hit this city in the Cascade Range at 4:00 a.m. on March 1, 1910. As reported in the Al- bert Lea [Minn.] Evening Tribune of March 2, 1910, and elsewhere, the wall of snow “over- whelmed two Great Northern (passenger) trains, three (steam) locomotives, four huge electric motor engines, and brought death to more than a score of persons,” many of them railroad men. It also swept away the GN powerhouse, depot, and water tank, heavily damaged the railroad boarding house there,
and wiped out 15 miles of telegraph wire. Res- cuers dispatched on two rescue trains out of Everett, Wash., had to hike three mountain- ous miles, climbing 1000 feet in the process, to reach Wellington. The railroad boarding house played a role
in the tragedy that befell passengers and trainmen on the two trains — the Spokane Express and the Transcontinental Fast Mail. Heavy snowfall had stalled them in Welling- ton six days earlier. Passengers had taken to venturing to the boarding house and oth- er nearby cottages to eat, returning to their sleeping cars for the night. The article cited 20 bodies being recovered and 25 people miss- ing. The business car of GN Superintendent O’Neill, who was directing the response to the initial snow blockade, was among the cars de- stroyed, his private secretary — A. E. Long- coy — among the dead. A recent 35:15-minute documentary ex-
plores the site of this significant railroad di- saster. Find it here:
http://wn.com/welling- ton_washington_avalanche Wilcoe, West Virginia: According to the Bluefield [
W.Va.] Daily Telegraph of August 9, 1981, a boarding house here, between Welch and Bluefield in McDowell County, became so popular with Norfolk & Western workers that the owner took to calling it the “N&W Y.M.C.A.” It was known for the gen- erous portions of beans and corn bread that accompanied the five vegetables and three meats offered at each meal, for the welcome hungry hobos found if they ventured in at mealtime, and for the coal dust that surfaced under foot from the floorboards in the dining room. The building was demolished in 1978. Knox, Indiana: The Knox Starke County Democrat of October 21, 1914, reported that 20-year-old Frank Dora, who was arrested and locked in the county jail two weeks ear- lier for stealing some clothing from the Penn- sylvania Railroad boarding house in Hamlet, had entered a guilty plea to one charge of petit larceny and as a result was sentenced to one to eight years in the Indiana Reformatory. Goshen, Indiana: The Goshen Democrat
of March 13, 1906, reporting on testimony before a commission then investigating the “Evils of the Butter Trade,” cites one witness who refers to what he must consider a “worst case scenario” by describing “the most slov- enly jade that ever ran a railroad boarding house.” We can take that to mean that not all operators matched up favorably with the wid- ow Kennedy. Mitchell, Indiana: The Mitchell Commer-
cial, under a dateline of April 9, 1896, out of Indianapolis, used the catchy headline “Both Used Blades” to report, “There was a murder- ous affray in a railroad boarding house on State Street between Thomas Kane and George Few, the latter recently coming here from Spring- field, O. Kane use a razor and Few handled a knife, and both men were horribly slashed. The Springfield man claimed that Kane made disparaging remarks about his wife.” Essex, Montana: And then there’s the now-iconic three-story Izaak Walton Inn on the eastern edge of Glacier National Park
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