Industrial America Relived at North Carolina Museum

January 1988

by J. Barlow Herget - National Geographic News Service

SPENCER, N. C. - It was loud, dirty, and full of hiss and steam. Hammers clanged on steel and men shouted to be heard over the noise. It ran day and night, seven days a week. Almost 3,000 people toiled in its stalls and chambers. It was a sweating, real—life picture of industrial America at work.

This was the Spencer Shops, one of the country's largest railroad shops for steam locomotives. Today, it provides a quiet gathering place for retired railroaders and a real—life setting for North Carolina's Transportation Museum.

"If you didn't want to get dirty or listen to noise, you didn't go over there," declares C. E. "Pappy" Spear, 62, mayor of Spencer. He started work in the shops at age 17, learning to make boilers for the engines that got overhauled there.

The shops were built in 1896 and the town soon followed, both namesakes of Samuel Spencer, the Southern Railway baron. Their principal virtue was their location at Mile Post 334, midway between Washington and the big rail hub at Atlanta.

Steam locomotives had to be serviced every 150 miles, and the Spencer Shops became the Southern's largest service station.

The shops are mostly empty today. They stand silent, a hulking ghost factory built for another time but too solid to fall down. But life stirs in what once weas the master mechanic's building, adjacent to the highway that separates the 57 acres of shops from the small Piedmont town.

"There's a certain flavor of the railroad in the town," says Supervisor Michael C. Wells. "Many of the people who live here retired from the railroad and worked at the shops."

In the museum is the Spencer Ties Room, where many of the retirees come and swap stories and drink coffee. "They're proud of their railroad heritage," says Wells.

That heritage looms over the town in the massive iron and brick buildings that compose the shops. There is the main repair station known simply as the Back Shop largest of all the structures, seven stories tall and cavernous — 595 feet by 150 feet.

Pigeons roost among its broken windows and on the superstructure that held giant overhead cranes. The special wooden—peg flooring helped to absorb the noise as well as the grease and sweat of decades. Two sets of tracks run through the middle of the building, where 75 engines a day could be serviced, having rods greased and drawbars tested, getting sand in their sandboxes and oil in their cooling systems.

Close by is the great, 37-bay roundhouse that has been returned to working order this year. "It's the biggest one I've ever seen," says W." L. "Buck" Honeycutt, 61, who was 19 when he went to work at the shops.

The sprawling grounds include the powerhouse that generated its own steam and electricity for the 1 million square feet of shop space. Other buildings include the paint shop, flue shop, ice house, and oil house. A converted rail car now serves as a theater for museum programs.

In the old days, there was the feared lye pit, used for cleaning greasy metal parts. As Spear recalls, "They had this huge pit, and people worked around there all the time. That lye was pretty strong, and it was the end of you if you fell in."

Across the highway is a restaurant where Evelyn Krider has tended the counter since 1943 and remembers the fare and prices of those days: "One meat, two vegetables, a drink, and dessert for 47 cents," she says.

They had an efficient system, .says Mrs. Krider: "We would reserve their seats for them and send someone over with a menu, and they'd mark their names beside what they wanted, so that when they got here, they had their meals waiting for them. You dared not get their seats. They generally liked something that would stick to them, pinto beans and dumplings, chicken-fried steak. No fancy vegetables like broccoli."

The advent of diesel engines, which required less maintenance, spelled the end of the Spencer Shops, although it was I960 before the shops closed. "I got sick," says Honeycutt of the day they shut the shops. "The memories that come back to me is how men could take steel and put it together amnd make an engine out of it." The memories come back to others, too, in the famous ballad, The Wreck of the Old 97. It was to Spencer that the locomotive was speeding in 1903 when it failed to make a curve and plunged into a ravine, killing the engineer and 10 others.

And, not far from the shops one October night in 1901, one of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show trains collided head-on with freight engine No. 75. Ninety-two horses perished, and 40 more had to be shot. Amazingly, no people were killed, but the wreck left markswoman Annie Oakley partially paralyzed.

Supervisor Wells hopes to bring back many of the Spencer Shop memories. With help from townsfolk and museum patrons, some 40 pieces of rolling stock and six engines are "being restored. They include a Baldwin No. 4 steam engine and elegant private cars once owned by steel and tobacco magnates.

Wells also helps organize railroad excursions through the Blue Ridge Mountains with retired conductors and open-air coaches.

The Spencer Shops are only five minutes off Interstate 85. But by rail, one can alight no nearer than Salsibury, several miles away. The trains don't stop at Spencer anymore.

The Paris News - Paris, Texas