Caldwell County MO Archives History .....EARLY HAMILTON RAILROAD HISTORY 
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Karen Walker khw4@yahoo.com September 4, 2008, 1:59 pm

EARLY HAMILTON RAILROAD HISTORY
	Narrator:  Chas. H. Bryant of Maryville

     Mr. Bryant belongs to the Bryant family which were in Caldwell county in 
the forties.  His father Harrison Bryant, was a small boy when the first train 
went thru Hamilton 1859, having been born 1848 on the old Bryant homestead 
five and one half miles northeast of Hamilton.  They were genuine old settlers.
     Harrison Bryant often told the story to his children of going to town 
that day to see a train go thru.  The family got into the old farm wagon with 
an ox team hitched to it and drove over east of Hamilton about where the east 
coal mine is now located.  The place was then called Skunk Hollow.  It seems 
that the railroad was built both ways, from Hannibal and from St. Joe.  Word 
had gone out throughout the country that the first train on the new road would 
go thru on that particular day.  Somehow everyone knew it and planned for it.
     Nearly all the settlers for several miles on either side of the track 
gathered there where the two sections of the road met.  There they were that 
morning with their ox teams, hitched to big farm wagons, seated with chairs, 
since that was before the days of spring seats.
     They were sitting there in their wagons looking at the train and the 
great locomotive, and talking about the train, which was the first train the 
most of them had seen, when suddenly, the train crew blew a shrill blast on 
the whistle.  At the sound, the ox teams whirled around with the wagons, 
upsetting the chairs in the wagons, and of course the people in them, and ran 
as fast as they could across the prairie towards their homes.  The people were 
scrambling in the wagons to regain their chairs.  There were no fences then to 
stop the oxen, so they ran all the way home in some instances.
     Harrison Bryant told his children that when they were building the 
railroad, the work was done by imported Irishmen, and they often came to the 
Bryant home, two and a half miles north, to get buttermilk to drink.  They 
would ride over to the farm on mules and carry back enough buttermilk for the 
camp.
     Interview  1934.


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