Gathering Leaves

By the mid-19^th century, the time to cross the Atlantic between Europe and North America was down from weeks to days. In 1848 trans-Atlantic crossings average time from Liverpool to New York (including a stop at Halifax) was down to 12 days 22 hours. In 1851, they averaged 11 days 12 hours eastbound, and 12 days 9 hours westbound. In that era, the fastest sailing vessels, the China Clippers, when fully rigged and riding a trade wind, had a peak average speed of over 16 knots (30 km/h).

The decade of the 1840’s was a tumultuous period. The Panic of 1837, triggered by bank failures in the US, lead to a depression that lasted until 1845. In Europe, harvest failures in the mid-1840’s lead to famines such as the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849). In the 1840’s the German Confederation was a largely autocratic political structure consisting of 39 independent states. Rapid industrialization caused a socio-economic crisis as worker’s living standards dropped and alcohol consumption increased. In 1848 a wave of revolutions swept throughout Europe. In was in this decade that my German ancestors came over from the Grand Duchy of Baden and my Irish ancestors came over from North Ireland.

Joseph Kollros (my ggg-grandfather) and Magdalena Ringwald emigrated in 1844 from Baden, Germany. Their port of arrival is not known and their port of embarkation would probably have been Hamburg or Calais. In the 1840′s emigration from the Duchy of Baden was made illegal and many fled political oppression in the German State by obtaining Alsatian visas from the French authorities across the Rhine River. It is therefore most likely that the Kollros family left Europe by way of the Port of Calais. Their destination was a small town in southeastern Indiana named Madison – approximately half along the Ohio River between Cincinnati, Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky.

To get from the eastern seaboard to the town of Madison, Indiana on the Ohio River the Kollros family would have traveled possibly by rail from Baltimore to Cumberland. At Cumberland they would have traveled by wagon or stage along the National Pike through southwestern Pennsylvania to Wheeling, Virginia (now in West Virginia). From Wheeling they may have traveled by steamboat down the Ohio River to Madison or continued on the National Pike to Dayton, Ohio. From Dayton they would have traveled down the Miami-Ohio canal to Cincinnati and then by riverboat to Madison.

The National Pike was a road created by an Act of Congress in 1806 that called for a road connecting the Atlantic coast to the Ohio River. The National Pike runs from Baltimore, through western Maryland, across the southwest corner of Pennsylvania and into West Virginia. In western Maryland and Pennsylvania, the road roughly followed Braddock’s Road. In eastern Ohio, it followed Zane’s Trace. Today US Highway 40 roughly follows the remains of the National Pike. (See National Road Tour (1840′s) for map of route)

Elenora Keenan, my ggg-grandmother, was born c. 1799 in Northern Ireland, and died c. 1860 in Louisville, Kentucky. She, along with her second husband and their children, immigrated to the United States in 1849 from Ireland; arriving on November 01, 1849 at the Port of New Orleans from Liverpool.

Before the widespread use of steamboats, a trip from Louisville to New Orleans often required four months and was limited to a one-way, downstream trip. Kentucky traders (Caintucks) would come down the river on flat-bottom boats hauling tobacco and whiskey to New Orleans. For the trip back they would bust up their boats, sell the lumber, and return to Kentucky, usually on foot, by way of the 440-mile Natchez Trace to Nashville. In 1820, the trip was made by steamboat in 20 days. By 1838, the same trip was being made in six days.

The Bannon/Campbell family would have traveled from New Orleans to Louisville by way of steamboat up the Mississippi river to the Ohio River – the trip taking six to eight days. (See Belfast to Cincinnati Tour (1850s) for map route)

One thing is certain, that is based on the birth dates, and birthplaces of his children that the George Spiegel family migrated from Savannah, Georgia to Dallas, Texas around 1870-71. In the early 1870s, Dallas was a major boomtown. On July 16, 1872, the first passenger train, the Houston and Texas Central, arrived in Dallas. In 1873, the Texas and Pacific came. With the arrival of the trains, the population soared, from 3,000 in early 1872 to more than 7,000 in September of the same year. New businesses and buildings appeared daily.

Based on information found in a 19th century tour guide written by Edward King, originally serialized in the magazine Scribner’s Monthly in 1871 and then published as a book in 1875, it safe to assume that the Spiegels were able to make part of their journey by rail from Savannah to at least as far as Mobile, Alabama or New Orleans, Louisiana. From south Louisiana they would then had to have taken a steamer to Galveston and from there make the rest of the journey by rail up to Dallas by way of Houston, Hempstead, and Waco. The first leg of their journey would have been by rail from Savannah to Columbus, Georgia. The next leg may have been from Columbus to Montgomery, Alabama and then down to Mobile, Alabama by rail or it may have been from Columbus to Eufaula, Alabama on the Chattahoochee River and the down the river by steam boat to Apalachicola, Florida. This is described by King on pgs 364-365:

Savannah’s progress since the war has not been less remarkable than that of the whole State. The recuperation of its railroad system has been astonishing. Sherman’s army, in its march to the sea, destroyed one hundred and ten miles of the Georgia Central railroad track between Savannah and Macon, and thirty-nine miles between Savannah and Augusta. The military authorities returned the road to the control of its directors, June 22, 1865, and early in 1866 it was reconstructed so as to answer the public demand.

This immense corporation at present operates in its interest, with its tributaries, 1,545 miles of railway. It extends from Savannah to Macon, thence by the South-western and Muscogee road to the thriving cotton-spinning town of Columbus, thence by the Columbus and Opelika route to Opelika, a brisk manufacturing town in Alabama, thence to Montgomery, and through Selma gets an unbroken rail communication with the Mississippi river at Vicksburg. This, it is expected, will be the connecting point of the Southern Pacific route with the roads leading to the Atlantic coast.

The Central’s connections also give Savannah direct communication with New York and Memphis via the Atlanta and Chattanooga route, and connection at Augusta with the South Carolina road. From Macon it sends out another arm to grasp Atlanta,–the Macon and Western road,–and there, also, connects with the Georgia railroad to Eufaula, Alabama, whence, by steamers on the Chattahoochee River, it secures an outlet to the Gulf of Mexico.

It is not clear that there was in 1872 a railroad yet connecting Mobile and New Orleans, from New Orleans they would have to have gone by boat from to Galveston, Texas as there was at that time a gap of several miles in the railway between Monroe and Shreveport separated by swamps. This next leg of the journey is described by King (pg 99 et seq.):

One of the saddest sights in New Orleans or Galveston is the daily arrival of hundreds of refugees from the older Southern States, seeking homes on the Texan prairies. The flood of emigration from South Carolina, Alabama and Georgia is formidable, and turned the tide of politics in Texas, in a single year, from Republican flood to Democratic ebb.

Old men and little children, youths and maidens, clad in homespun, crowd the railway cars, looking forward eagerly to the land of promise. The ignorance of these poor people with regard to the geography of the country in general, is dense. “I never traveled so much befo’,” is a common phrase; “is Texas a mighty long ways off yet?” The old men, if one enters into conversation with them, will regale him with accounts of life in their homes “befo’ the surrender.” With them, everything dates from the war, leaving the past irrevocably behind its yawning gulf, while in front there is only poverty–or flight.

The route from New Orleans to Brashear City [now called Morgan City] is, in the delightful months of April and May, one of the most beautiful in the South. The railroad which connects at Brashear City with the Morgan steamers sailing to Galveston, and along which the tide of emigration constantly flows, traverses weird forests and lofty cane-brakes, and passes over bayous, swamps, and long stretches of sugar plantations.

Crossing the Mississippi by the great railroad ferry to Algiers, the traveler soon leaves behind the low, green banks, studded with neat, white houses embowered in a profusion of orange groves; and is borne out of sight of the black lines of smoke left upon the cloudless sky by the funnels of the river steamers. He passes Bayou des Allemands, and a low country filled with deep, black pools; hurries across the reedy and saturated expanse of Trembling Prairie, dotted with fine oaks; rattles by Raceland, and its moist, black fields, to La Fourche Bayou, on which lies the pretty, cultivated town of Thibodeaux.

He next passes Chacahoula swamp, a wilderness of shriveled cypresses and stagnant water; Tigerville, with its Indian mounds; the rich Bæuf country, along the banks of whose lovely bayou lie wonderful sugar lands, once crowded with prosperous planters, but now showing many an idle plantation. He passes immense groves, from the boughs of whose trees thousands of Spanish moss beards are pendent; and through which long and sombre aisles, like those of a cathedral, open to right and left. He wonders at the presence of the bearded moss on all the trees, and his commercial eye perhaps suggests that it be made available in upholstery; but he is told that the quaint parasite already does good service as the scavenger of the air.

At Brashear City he finds a steamer for Texas at the fine docks built by the enterprising proprietor of the “Morgan line,” and notes, as he passes out to the blue waters of the Gulf, the richness of the vegetation along the shores of the inlet. An afternoon and a night–and he is in Galveston.

The coast line of Texas, bordering upon the Gulf of Mexico from Sabine Pass to the Rio Grande,–from the Louisiana boundary to the hybrid, picturesque territory where the American and Mexican civilizations meet and conflict, is richly indented and studded with charming bays. Trinity, Galveston, West, Matagorda, Espiritu Santu, Aransas, and Corpus Christi harbors, each and all offer varied possibilities for future commerce. The whole coast, extending several hundred miles, is also bordered by a series of islands and peninsulas, long and narrow in form, which protect the inner low-lying banks from the high seas…

…The great sea highway to which I have previously alluded, from Brashear City, on Berwick’s Bay, on the Louisiana coast, to Galveston, is well known and fascinating to the modern traveler. The enterprise and liberal expenditure of a citizen of New York, Mr. Charles Morgan, has covered the waves of this route with steamships, which, until recently, furnished the only means of communication between Texas and the rest of the United States.

The Morgan Line was not merely the outgrowth of an earnest demand; it was the work of an adventurous pioneer; and although its importance, in view of the grand railroad development of Northern Texas, can henceforth be but secondary, its founder will always be remembered for his foresight and daring. The improvements in the channels from Berwick’s Bay outward are also the work of the owner of this line. They comprehend the dredging of a great bar which once obstructed the short passage to the Gulf, and when completed will be of infinite importance to the commerce of the whole south-west. Thousands of tons of shells have been dragged out of the dark-blue water to make room for the prows of the Morgan fleet, pointed toward Galveston and Indianola.

And what is Galveston? A thriving city set down upon a brave little island which has fought its way out of the depths of the Gulf, and given to the United States her noblest beach, and to Texas an excellent harbor.

The final leg of their journey would have been by rail from Galveston to Dallas via Houston. (See Savannah to Dallas Tour (1870s) for map of route)

(This has been part 4 of a 4 part series regarding communications and transportation in the 19^th century)