Speaking for the more than 8,000 Frisco people located throughout our system,
I'd like to thank you for including us among the groups and institutions being
honored with special days during this celebration of Chaffee's Diamond
Anniversary. Through the 75 years since Chaffee first grew up out of
a wheat field, there has been a very close relationship between Chaffee and the
Frisco, a relationship of which both town and railroad can be proud.
In a very real sense, the railroad put Chaffee on the map, and it is fitting
during this community birthday celebration for us to go back to the turn of the
century and see why and how Chaffee came to be born.
It was an exciting time for the nation as a whole; the United States
was coming into its own as a world power after the Spanish - American War, and
here at home the last great burst of railroad construction was filling out the
network of trackage to such an extent that ......?.... country lived
within 20 miles of a railroad.
Here in Southeast Missouri, a great deal of railroad track was already in
place thanks to Louis Houck of Cape Girardeau; The Houck Lines spread
throughout Southeast Missouri and Northeast Arkansas during the 1880's and early
1890's. By the turn of the century, however, the flamboyant style of
Houck and the other early-day railroad builders was giving way to that of
railroad magnates who were seeking not just to lay track but to build railroad
systems that would meet the needs of the future.
Among these men was Benjamin Franklin Yoakum, who became Vice-President and General
Manager of the Frisco in the mid - 1890's and was elected President of the
company early in 1900. Yoakum dreamed of nothing less than a
railroad empire in the Midwest, and he wasted no time in making his dream come
true.
First, the Frisco acquired the Kansas City, Fort Scott & Memphis
Railroad, a long-time competitor whose line from Kansas City through Memphis to
Birmingham remains part of the Frisco to this day. Before the first
decade of the twentieth century was half over, Yoakum had succeeded in combining
the Frisco, Rock Island and Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroads into a single
system covering the entire Midwest from Minnesota and Chicago to Texas.
But the system was incomplete without an outlet to the Gulf Coast, and Yoakum
envisioned a water-level railroad route down the west bank of the Mississippi
River all the way from St. Louis to New Orleans. By1905, Yoakum had
consolidated the operations of his existing system sufficiently to begin
construction of his line to the Gulf of Mexico, and it was the construction of
that line that brought Chaffee into being.
At that time, the wheat field that occupied the site of Chaffee was
surrounded by the lines built by Houck and acquired by the Frisco in
1902. The St. Louis, Memphis & Southeastern Railway had been
organized as a subsidiary of the Frisco to rebuild the Houck Lines as necessary
and to construct such additional links as were needed to make a through line
from St. Louis to Memphis, the first step of the west-bank railroad from St.
Louis to New Orleans.
One of those additional links - in fact, the one that closed the final gap
between St. Louis and Memphis, connected Nash and Lilbourn, MO, passing through
the site of Chaffee. Not only would the new line tap traffic from
St. Louis, it also would handle traffic moving between Chicago and Memphis by
way of the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad and that line's bridge over the
Mississippi River at Thebes, IL.
Cape Girardeau, which had traditionally been Frisco's Southeast Missouri
headquarters, was north of the junction between the St. Louis and Chicago lines,
so land was purchased for a "townsite" just south of the junction and
the Frisco system began moving men, machines and offices to the new town of
Chaffee, which began growing rapidly. According to a brochure issued
by the Chaffee Real Estate Company in 1906, "When Southeast Missouri is
fully developed there will be no richer nor more prosperous section on this
continent, and Chaffee will be its commercial metropolis."
A crew of railroad construction men had moved into Chaffee in July of 1905,
and by the end of that year railroad facilities here included an office building
for Frisco and Chicago and Eastern Illinois Division officials, a substantial
passenger station and a roundhouse that could accommodate 30 locomotives, in
addition, a freight yard, water works system, car repair shop, powerhouse and a
large machine shop building were in place at Chaffee within little more than a
year of the time tracks were first laid here.
Chaffee was not without its growing pains, some of them caused by the fact
that so many railroad installations were built so quickly. It was
January of 1908 before the Chaffee correspondent for the "Frisco Man",
a predecessor of today's Frisco employee magazine, "All-Aboard", could
announce, "The labor train operated between Chaffee and Cape Girardeau for
the accommodation of shop employees who live in Cape Girardeau and work in
Chaffee has been pulled off, the scarcity of homes and boarding houses at the
latter place having been relieved."
In fact, Chaffee was quite a booming little town. The
"Frisco Man" correspondent boasted that the Astoria Hotel was
"one of the most modern hotels in Southeast Missouri." The
building boom continued unabated through 1908 and 1909, as a ball park, a
planing mill, five store buildings, a restaurant, an elevator, an "electric
theater" and numerous cottages and boarding houses spread westward from the
rails that created Chaffee.
Not all the problems were that easily overcome, however. For the
first three years of its life, Chaffee faced a major threat from malaria and for
that reason acquired somewhat of a bad reputation on the Frisco. It
developed that in ballasting the freight yards in 1907, a few low spots remained
to form collecting places for water and thus breeding grounds for the mosquitoes
that carried malaria. Dr. R.H. Lucas, Frisco's local physician, soon
determined the cause of the malaria epidemic, however, and in cooperation with
Frisco officials saw to it that the smaller pools were filled with gravel and
the larger ones drained, to good effect on the health of Chaffee's citizens.
By late 1910, Chaffee had come into its own as a railroad town, and as such
was of such vast importance that there was some talk of moving the county seat
here. Few of us now can recognize the complete dependence on
railroads in that day. Roads were inadequate for the most part,
water transportation was slow and limited in the territory it could cover, and
that left railroads as the only practical means of transportation for people and
freight. Six passenger trains a day left Chaffee for such places as
St. Louis, Memphis and Chicago, and the seasonal cantaloupe and watermelon
harvests in addition to the normal flow of freight traffic kept the rails
through Chaffee polished brightly.
Those shining rails were more than Chaffee's sustenance: They were its
link to what was going on in the world. During the spring and
summer, special trains left Chaffee every weekend and sometimes on weekdays to
carry baseball fans to St. Louis. Frisco's agricultural car drew
many area residents to its exhibits of scientific farming methods and their
products. The International Correspondence School's car attracted
railroad men eager to improve existing skills and add new ones. And
one of the largest crowds probably was drawn by the Chapel Car "Messenger
of Peace", which paused at Chaffee for religious services as it made its
way around the country in 1910. But change was coming as early as
1912, when a "Good Roads" exhibit car sponsored by Frisco stopped at
Chaffee to promote the paving of roads to make travel by automobile
easier. Little did anyone suspect that the automobile would surpass
and finally eliminate the passenger train as a means of transportation for
people.
More unwelcome changes were on the way that year, however, as the Mississippi
River burst its levees and kept low-lying Frisco track in this region under
water for almost two months. Traffic through Chaffee was reduced to
a trickle, and the Frisco as a whole barely stayed out of the red in
1912. In fact, the whole U.S. economy was sliding into a recession,
and the Frisco entered bankruptcy one year later.
Yoakum's dream was shattered. The Frisco, Rock Island and Chicago
and Eastern Illinois Railroads went their separate ways, and the line down the
west bank of the Mississippi River would extend only from St. Louis to
Memphis. The bankruptcy, and with it the loss of the rail link to
Chicago, marked the end of the first chapter in Chaffee's life and bring me to
the end of my remarks today.
But the close ties that bound Chaffee and the railroad in the early years
have continued to the present. The trains still roll through
Chaffee, and may of the residents of this community are proud to call themselves
railroaders or members of a railroad family. Chaffee, with its
railroad background, has given many men and women - some of them here today - a
solid start towards the positions of responsibility they hold today not only on
the Frisco but on other railroads as well.
You all are aware that Frisco soon will lose its corporate identity through
merger with Burlington Northern, the nation's longest railroad. None
of us like to see Frisco's "coonskin" emblem disappear, it has been a
part of us for too many years and a part of Chaffee for 75 years
now. But I expect that the railroad, by whatever name it's called,
will be just as important a part of this community as ever when railroaders and
residents gather to celebrate Chaffee's Centennial in the twenty-First century.
