William and Henry Walters: Father & Son Founders of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad

By Gregg M Turner

Railroads were the first big business enterprises in America, and they made possible many other industries. They knitted our expansive nation together and have ably transported people, goods, materials, supplies, express items, and mail.

Literally, hundreds of railroads, if not more, were built in the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among the more important was the fabled Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, which, by 1931, owned, controlled, or operated over 14,000 miles of transportation lines.

The founders of this extraordinary firm were William and Henry Walters, father and son. Both are today largely remembered for their achievements in collecting works of art and establishing a world-class museum in Baltimore. But equally significant were their extraordinary efforts in founding and building up one of the great railway systems in America.

Climb aboard for a special journey into this unique chapter of American railroad history!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662469329

Book preview

Chapter 1

William Goes to Baltimore

There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

—Shakespeare, Julius Cesar

William Walters, one of eight children, was born 1819 in Liverpool, Pennsylvania, a bucolic setting on the western bank of the Susquehanna River about thirty miles northwest of Harrisburg. A canal had been built through the setting in the late 1820s—from Columbia down to Havre de Grace, Maryland. The barges plying the waterway often transported coal, grain, produce, and freight.

Of Scotch Irish descent, William’s father was a country merchant, liquor purveyor, and a one-time banker. He was always impressed by the unexploited mineral resources of western Pennsylvania and persuaded William to become a civil or mining engineer. His son eventually studied such subjects in Philadelphia, although no record exists that he graduated from a college. Returning from school, young Walters explored the wilds of the Allegheny Mountains on foot and horseback in search of new sources of coal. By the time he was twenty-one, he had managed the first smelting mill in America to produce iron in coal-fired furnaces.¹

Perhaps owing to low wages or the dismal working conditions he had to endure, William Walters convinced himself that the world of commerce offered far more opportunities to make money. Thus, at age twenty-two, he relocated to bustling Baltimore, where he might establish himself as a commission merchant, for he had a good knowledge of Pennsylvania-grown products brought to that metropolis for reselling.

William Thompson Walters

In 1841, a Baltimore newspaper carried a classified advertisement announcing that William Walters and Samuel Hazlehurst had formed a partnership to transact a general commission business. The pair secured a warehouse at Commerce Street Wharf with advantages to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in front and water communication in the rear, where the usual Bay vessels can discharge with the facility. With these advantages and strict attention to all business entrusted to their care, they hope to merit the share of public favor.² How much money William put into the partnership is unknown or if his father had played a financial role. In any event, the partners found a niche and prospered in the produce trade coming from Pennsylvania. William’s profits, prudently managed, would soon make possible other business ventures.

William Walters would marry Ellen Harper in 1846; her father was a prosperous Philadelphia merchant. Two of their three children would survive infancy. Henry was born in 1848; his sister, Jennie, arrived four years later. The family lived at various locations in Baltimore and eventually occupied a handsome, three-story brick residence in the fashionable quarter of Mount Vernon Place.

The Walters-Hazlehurst partnership disbanded in 1850, with the latter going off to become an independent flour merchant. Before parting, the partners had moved their commission firm to Spear’s Wharf. William now invited Charles Harvey of Philadelphia to join him, and the firm of Walters and Harvey evolved. Other partners were absorbed, including William’s younger brother, Edwin. A newspaper advertisement two years later noted that W. T. Walters & Company had opened a new, five-story brick warehouse on Exchange Place. By now, the production and sale of liquors had become a significant revenue stream. The new facility, which could store some fifty-five thousand gallons of intoxicants, sported a colonnade at its front. The interior had every convenience, and mules were used to help move the bulky liquor caskets and raw materials between the various floors.³

But owning a successful commission business and a burgeoning liquor production facility that now serviced the southern states was just the beginning. The successful entrepreneur, ever mindful of efficient transportation, became involved with steamships. In 1856, the Savannah Steamship Company became organized with Walters as president and a board member. The company’s first vessel, the City of Norfolk, would prove to be a reliable conveyor of people, goods, as well as an excellent investment.⁴

Another vessel Walters had a financial interest in was the City of Savannah, which met with a disaster that same year. En route to Baltimore from Savannah, the vessel sprang a leak about thirty miles off the intrepid waters of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The crew quickly engaged water pumps but could not keep abreast of incoming ocean water, which rose to a four-foot depth. The Sylph, loaded with sugar, saw its distress flares and raced to the foundering steamship. At Cove Point, the rescued crew boarded the Mary Washington, which turned about and made a hasty retreat to Baltimore. William Walters was on hand to greet the seamen and thanked all those who helped with the rescue effort. The Savannah’s valuable cargo of sugar went to the bottom of the Atlantic along with twelve bales of feathers, eighteen barrels of whiskey, eight hundred bales of cotton, three hundred sixty boxes of copper ore, fifty casks of rice, and thirty-one bales of domestics.⁵

In 1860, Walters and other prominent businesspeople incorporated themselves (with state approval) as the Baltimore Marine Insurance Company. A corporate office opened at Second Street, and the firm quickly raised $300,000 of paid-in capital.⁶ After the Savannah disaster, Walters had become very interested in how insurance companies were structured and prospered. The fact that shipping into and out of Baltimore was rapidly increasing presented an excellent investment opportunity that William the Aggressor had to seize.

Years before entering the insurance business, Walters became interested in railroads and railroad company investments. He believed that the Iron Horse was best suited to rapidly convey not only time-sensitive shipments of produce but of people and freight. Trains were also not subject to the vagaries of weather or dangerous ocean conditions. Moreover, he likely foresaw the day Baltimore would be directly connected to the southern states by railroads, a territory renowned for its agricultural and forest products. But a railway conduit achieving those ends was still years away.

In the meantime, Walters directed his interests to a local firm: the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad (the B&S) and became one of its directors in 1853.⁷ The company, whose route departed Baltimore and headed toward York, Pennsylvania, transported a goodly amount of agricultural products that, when destined to Walters, were sold by his commission firm. However, the company’s financial condition was hardly noteworthy, and a ghastly collision of two of its trains on Independence Day, 1854, would cast a long dark shadow. Further, the firm’s floating (unpaid and current) debt of $100,000 did not help matters. A year later, the B&S and several other small rail operations consolidated themselves as the Northern Central Railway Company. Its fifth and sixth annual reports note that Walters was a director.⁸ Serving with him was US Senator Simon Cameron, the Republican boss of Pennsylvania.

Baltimore’s story in the Civil War hardly needs retelling, save to say that the Monument City was home to both Union and Confederate sympathizers. In fact, it worked itself into a wartime fever well before that conflict began. The air was sulfurous with sedition and counterplots. Militia companies with strange banners and equipment that outshone the sun drilled in the streets.⁹ Walters, a Confederate sympathizer, had significant commercial and financial ties to the South, mainly since his lucrative commission produce business came from that region. He also felt that Maryland should secede from the Union to maintain political, societal, and economic stability. After Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor had been fired upon by Confederate shore batteries, on April 12, 1861, Walters publicly solicited funds to have a canon fired to celebrate the