During the summer of 1916 my father worked as part of a survey crew for the Cumberland Valley Railroad (CVRR). The CVRR began operation in 1837 and immediately became a success serving the prosperous Cumberland Valley. Initially linking Harrisburg and Chambersburg, it eventually extended south to Hagerstown, Maryland, and on to Winchester, Virginia, and the Shenandoah Valley. During the Civil War it was a popular target for the Rebels, with significant raids in 1862 and 1863, followed by the burning of Chambersburg by Rebel General John McAusland in 1864. That summer my father had just completed his Sophomore year at Penn State where he was studying Civil Engineering. Thirty-five years later I replicated this experience with a summer job for the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR).
The President of the CVRR in 1916 was Moorhead Kennedy. Although it had been controlled by the PRR for a number of years, the CVRR was still being operated independently at that time. Kennedy’s father had been President of the railroad from 1873 to 1905; he became President in 1913. A flamboyant individual, he was Chambersburg’s best-known citizen, occupying a large mansion in the city as well as a large summer home, the Ragged Edge, a few miles outside the city. At that time my father’s brother, Emory Cook Oyler, was Assistant to the CVRR Chief Engineer. His journals record numerous interactions with Mr. Kennedy, including social affairs at the Ragged Edge. Kennedy was famous for hosting large groups of friends there, with many of them staying in railway sleeper cars on a special siding serving the facility. Mr. Kennedy had a faithful valet, Royal Christian, without whom he had difficulty functioning.
Although Samuel Rea was President of the PRR in 1916, Vice President of Operations William Atterbury was acknowledged to be the most knowledgeable railroader in the country, running the world’s largest, most successful railroad from his office in Philadelphia. Other important actors in this drama are President Woodrow Wilson, heavily occupied with his campaign for a second term in the White House based on the slogan “He kept us out of war”, and Brigadier General John J. Pershing, deep in Mexico with 10,000 troops chasing Pancho Villa.
A year later everything had changed and its effect on these five gentlemen had been significant. Following his re-election, relations with Germany had deteriorated so much that Wilson persuaded Congress to declare war on April 6, 1917. He activated the National Guard and the Reserves and called for one million volunteers to join the military. He also promoted Pershing to Major General and selected him to serve as Commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). Pershing went to France in June to meet the Allied commanders and plan the deployment of the AEF. Their conclusion was the decision to assign the southern portion of the front to the Americans, allowing the French to concentrate their forces in the center. After inspecting the French railway system Pershing concluded that his forces needed their own rail services and an organization to operate them.
On August 6, 1917, William Atterbury was granted a leave of absence from the PRR and commissioned as a brigadier general in the US Army. He left for France to become Director-General of Transportation for the AEF. It was no coincidence when Moorhead Kennedy notified his friends and family soon thereafter that he too had joined the AEF. He left for Europe on October 9, 1917, where he would serve as Atterbury’s Deputy, with the rank of Colonel. He was there just a short time before becoming disillusioned with his “batman” (orderly) and requesting that his trusted valet join him.
Getting Royal Christian to Europe turned out to be a challenge. Fortunately, this is well documented in a book “Roy’s Trip to the Battlefields of Europe” that he wrote after the war and in “Porter, Steward, Citizen”, an annotated version edited by African-American History scholar Pellom McDaniels III. Christian was too old (43) to be enlisted in the Army and no one in the bureaucracy was interested in helping an African-American valet get to Europe. Eventually enough strings were pulled that he was granted a passport and permitted to work his way across the Atlantic as Steward for an Officer’s Mess on a troopship and to be reunited with Kennedy, where he was given the title of “Confidential Messenger to the Deputy Director of the Transportation Service”.
In the meantime, response to Wilson’s call for volunteers had been disappointing. Congress passed the Selective Service Act on May 18, 1917; in August it was put into action. A front-page story in the September 4, 1917, Chambersburg Public Opinion reported that the Franklin County Draft Board had selected its first eighty-one conscripts, including Francis Marion Oyler, R. R. 1, Waynesboro. Somewhere we have a September 19, 1917, newspaper clipping with a photograph showing a group of young men, including him, boarding a train for Camp Meade, Maryland, and induction. Ironically, thirty-six years later, he would be at the Old Post Office on Smithfield Street in Downtown Pittsburgh watching his elder son board a bus for the very same location for the very same reason. That was an emotional scene, the first time I saw my father cry.
He went through infantry basic training there, then was transferred to Camp Grant, near Rockford, Illinois, on November 9 to join the 35th Engineers Regiment. This regiment was authorized on September 5, 1917, with the specific mission of assembling freight cars in France in a facility that they would have to construct. The authorization requested nine companies, each having 225 “men of railroad shop erecting trades”. Thanks to the regimental history, “But We Built the Cars”, we know that they did indeed organize at Camp Grant into three battalions, each consisting of three companies, and leave for France in three separate detachments. The first detachment, consisting of Companies D, E, and F boarded a troop ship Hoboken, New Jersey on December 9, 1917; my father was member of Company F. The other two followed on January 20, 1918, and on February 8, 1918.
We have a letter from my father to his family describing the trip from Illinois to Hoboken, New Jersey, by rail, through Ontario. We have always wondered why they took such a circuitous route. The answer may be related to the state of railroads in the United States in those days. Because of concern with inefficiencies in the national network, on December 26, 1917, President Wilson nationalized the railroads and appointed his son-in-law, Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, as administrator for the United States Railroad Administration. McAdoo was a brilliant lawyer whose only experience with railroads had been serving as President of a commuter line with tunnels beneath the Hudson River. We have read articles describing the backup of trains bringing troops to the debarkation ports; perhaps going through Canada avoided that problem. This experiment in nationalization ended in 1920 when the railroads were returned to their original management.
The first detachment arrived at St. Nazaire, France, on January 2, then moved to LaRochelle by troop train the next day. Their destination, eventually known as Camp Pullman, was a large area adjacent to a partially constructed railroad station. After making the building habitable, they set about to build a facility suitable for assembling railroad cars. Initially this required a lot of innovative thinking. Until a ten-ton railroad crane arrived, they relied on a home-made gin pole to unload heavy railcar components. They scavenged a dozen portable air compressors destined for a rock crushing operation to improvise a powerhouse. All told, they constructed eighty-eight major buildings of different types – barracks, assembly shops, a paint shop, etc. – primarily utilizing lumber salvaged from crates used for shipment of railcar components.
They assembled their first car on March 4, 1918 – a flat car. It was followed by 17,105 more cars in the next twelve months. The cars were assembled on a mass production assembly line. Initially the trucks were positioned on rails and the underframe attached to them. This assembly was then moved to another station where one side was attached, then sequentially one end, the other side, and the final end. The roof (for box cars) was added at another station, and then appurtenances added. The penultimate station was the paint shop, followed by a drying area. A variety of cars were assembled – flat cars, shallow and deep gondolas, box cars, refrigerator cars, and tank cars. Production peaked on September 27, 1918, when the regiment assembled 150 cars.
We never asked my father what his specific duties were at Camp Pullman. He certainly would have been useful during the construction phase, perhaps as a carpenter. Being a farm boy, he was capable of building practically anything. His mechanical skills were sufficient to be appropriate for the railcar assembly process. As far as the assembly process is concerned, I suspect that he may have functioned as an instrument man, using his surveying experience with a transit to ensure cars were assembled square and plumb – I spent three months in that role in Dravo’s barge assembly yard when I was in their Junior Engineer training program.
On November 12, 1918, one day after the Armistice was signed, the regiment’s designation was redesignated the 21st Grand Division, Transportation Corps. This was news to me – my father was proud of being part of the Corps of Engineers; I never heard him say a word about the Transportation Corps. At any rate Cape Pullman continued to produce cars until March 8, 1919, when the installation was turned over to “le Chemin de fer de l’Etat”, a state-owned railway system in western France, and the troops returned home.
My father’s recollections of his return home were dominated by bad experiences in “delousing camp” and poor rations (mostly sauerkraut) on the troop ship “Ohioan” on the return voyage. He was discharged at Camp Dix. New Jersey, on March 28, 1919, happy to be able to return to Penn State for his Senior year in the Fall.
By then Moorhead Kennedy was back in Chambersburg at the helm of the Cumberland Valley Railroad. In later years he entertained Atterbury, Pershing, and Marshal Foch at the Ragged Edge. Royal Christian continued to serve as valet until Kennedy died in 1936. At that time Kennedy’s Chambersburg mansion became the Chambersburg Club, with Royal Christian as its Steward. In 1945 he was awarded a license to operate a popular taxi service in Chambersburg; he had gained the status as “Institution” by the time he died in 1964.
General Atterbury took off his uniform and returned to the PRR, where he was elevated to President in 1925. General Pershing returned home to become Chief of Staff of the U. S. Army, eventually retiring in 1924. Wilson had a stroke on October 2, 1919, which severely compromised his presidency and his efforts to influence the treaty ending the War. He died in 1924.
Each of these men influenced the outcome of the war in different ways and to different degrees. I am proud of my father as a representative of the “good soldiers” who performed the mundane chores that contributed so much to the accomplishments for which their leaders became famous.