Baltimore and Ohio Railroad collection

This collection is the partial archives of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad for the years 1859-1880 and contains the records of the President’s Office (the President during this period was John Work Garrett, 1858-1884).

This collection contains thousands of incoming letters and telegrams pertaining to all phases of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad history from 1859-1880: finance; traffic; railroad competition and combination; labor; legal questions (purchase or condemnation of property, etc.); politics (items showing Baltimore and Ohio lobbying for or against bills on railroads in Congress and in various states such as Maryland, West Virginia, and Ohio); management and operations; plans and equipment; and relations with subsidiary railroad, steamship, and express companies. There are also letterpress copies or manuscript drafts of out-going correspondence from John W. Garrett and other leading Baltimore and Ohio officers, pertaining to the same subjects as well as hundreds of valuable interoffice memoranda to Garrett from his subordinates, often with penciled notations by Garrett in the margin. Numerous long, detailed letters between Garrett and his two vice-Presidents during the 1870s, John King, Jr. and William Keyser, full of discussions of railroad rate wars and conferences, contracts with shippers, the condition of the road, policy and management questions, etc.

This collection also contains hundreds of routine railroad items such as newspaper clippings; statistical reports and tables; drafts of Garrett’s speeches and remarks to Baltimore and Ohio board meetings; drafts of contract, agreements, briefs, etc.; routine reports from Baltimore and Ohio agents and other officers; correspondence pertaining to claims against the company; letters requesting free passes or information; pamphlets containing Garrett speeches; testimony of Baltimore and Ohio officers before Congress of State legislatures; copies of bills and laws and legal opinions affecting the company.

Items of particular importance include:

1) Several hundred letters and telegrams detailing the Baltimore and Ohio’s activity during the Civil War: troop movements, Confederate destruction of the Railroad property, efforts to keep the Railroad open and in repair, correspondence with Union generals and Government officials;

2) Several dozen copies of letters and telegrams relating to the Railroad Strikes of 1877;

3) Correspondence between King, Keyser, and Garrett, setting out Company strategy and policy concerning rate wars, pooling agreements, efforts to secure larger measures of the oil, grain, livestock, coal, and other important trades, general management of the road and its subsidiaries, political and legal questions, etc.

Among the more important corporations that figure more or less prominently in the correspondence are the Standard Oil Company, the House of Morgan, the Pennsylvania, New York Central, Erie, Wabash, and Reading Railroads, the Grand Trunk Railway, the North German Lloyd and Allan steamship lines, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Adams Express Company, and dozens of eastern, southern, and western railroad companies. Occasional important letters to and from the following business and railroad leaders: J. P. Morgan, Jay Gould, William H. Vanderbilt, J. Edgar Thomson, Thomas A. Scott, Alexander J. Cassatt, Collis P. Huntington, Franklin B. Gowen, A. J. Drexel, Samuel Sloan, Albert Fink and many others, including the leading officials of Standard Oil and every important railroad serving the Atlantic Coast and Middle West.