Steam in the Heart: Life and Times Along the Morehead and North Fork Rails Review

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(More customer reviews)In the heyday of the Morehead and North Fork Railroad, the following anecdote circulated in Morehead, Kentucky: Murvel Crosley, president of the M&NF from 1937 to 1959, supposedly presented himself at the main offices of the C&O Railroad and proposed to give its president a pass to ride the M&NF in exchange for a pass to ride the mighty C&O. When the C&O president laughed and said, "But your railroad is only a few miles long," Crosley shot back, "So? My railroad tracks are just as wide as yours."
Fred Brown's new book examines the Rowan and Morgan Counties area through the lens of the short line railroads, particularly the M&NF, that formed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to haul natural resources out of the eastern Kentucky hills. Brown begins in 1887, at the end of the feuding era in Rowan County, when "Morehead was refinding its moral compass"(7) and portrays the boom-and-bust atmosphere of speculation involving both locals and "Wall Street plungers."
The C&O line already ran through Morehead. Railroads with the life span of a mayfly sprang up to connect with it for the extraction of timber, coal, and stone. The M&NF achieved that link in 1906, an event that permanently shifted the center of commerce in the county from Farmers to Morehead. The main draw for investors was the old growth forest. In 1911, a yellow poplar felled in Rowan County yielded five sixteen foot logs before the first limb. Another log had a circumference of 27 feet (15). According to a Dr. Evans, in 1907 Rowan County "shipped five million staves to Germany and . . . ten million board feet of lumber were produced every year from 1895 to 1911."(131) The discovery of modest oil and gas reserves, as well as precious and semi-precious stones, boosted passenger traffic.
In serviceable prose, Brown tips in the national and regional picture but concentrates on portraying features along the line in loving detail--the perilous construction of the Clack Mountain Tunnel, the towns, the industries of Clearfield, the floods that swept away bridges and track. Well-chosen photographs and drawings augment the text.
By the early 1970s it was over, the forests depleted, the Lee Clay sewer pipe plant, by then the major user, eclipsed by plastic pipe. In 1973 the ICC approved cessation of operations for the M&NF; the "last official freight train" passed through Morehead in 1985. (155)
Brown has assembled a great many facts--perhaps to a fault--to recreate the times. Oddly, an article on a meteor that fell to earth in 1902 is included. The book will interest railroad buffs and regional historians as well as anyone with a taste for bygone eras. It is a useful addition to the historical literature featuring Morehead and its surrounding counties, which includes Don Flatt's history of Morehead State University, A Light to the Mountains; Jack Ellis' local histories; James McConkey's Rowan's Progress; Yvonne Baldwin's Cora Wilson Stewart and the Moonlight Schools; and Shirley Gish's Country Doctor: The Story of Claire Louise Caudill. Brown earlier teamed with Juanita Blair to write Days of Anger, Days of Tears concerning the Martin-Tolliver Feud.

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During the first half of the 20th century railroads were the life-blood of the country. They carried passengers and commerce to every corner of the nation. In Kentucky, plans were made as early as 1891 for a railroad to link Morgan County's coal fields with the C&O Railroad at Morehead. In 1906 the Morehead & North Fork Railway linked with the C&O in Morehead and the town soon replaced Farmers as the commercial and industrial center of the region.