“America’s Great Road” at the B&O Railroad Museum

Abstract

“AMERICA’S GREAT ROAD” AT THE B&O RAILROAD MUSEUM JOHN K. BROWN This modest permanent exhibit at the B&O Railroad Museum has important goals—providing an orientation to the museum and its collections, to the broader history of the Baltimore & Ohio, and to the technology and the historical role of American railroading generally. Given somewhat severe limitations of space (and funding, no doubt), “America’s Great Road” necessarily falls short of fulfilling these large goals. But the curators’ partial success deserves congratulations none­ theless. The exhibit marks a great departure for an institution whose other artifacts, displays, and interpretation mostly date to the dark ages of technology museums, conveying internalist history and Whiggish determinism. Hence, the real accomplishment lies in mounting a professional and informative, if incomplete, orientation that incor­ porates perspectives from contextual technological history and the new social history. The museum’s collection originated as an exhibit mounted by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposi­ tion. From that core, the railroad assembled a collection of locomo­ tives, rolling stock, and associated artifacts—many simply old, rather than historic—which it put on public display in 1953 at the Mt. Clare Roundhouse, adjacent to downtown Baltimore. In 1987, the B&O’s successor, CSX Corporation, finally established the museum as an independent entity with a professional staff.1 Dr. Brown teaches the history of technology at the University of Virginia. His history of the Baldwin Locomotive Works is published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and he is presently researching the rise of mechanical drawing in American industry and writing a book on the Eads Bridge, a project started by John A. Kouwenhoven . ’John H. White, Jr., “Baltimore and Ohio Transportation Museum,” Technology and Culture 11 (1970): 70-84, laid out the history of the museum and described the collec­ tion in detail. White also discussed the Fair of the Iron Horse, a pageant celebrating the B&O’s centennial in 1927, which provided an important impetus for saving the collection and led, indirectly, to founding the museum at Mt. Clare in the 1950s. Of related interest is White’s “The Railway Museum: Past, Present, and Future,” Technology and Culture 14 (1973): 599-613.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/95/3603-0010$01.00 641 642 John K. Brown To this day, however, the tired and dusty old iron on display cannot escape its heritage. There are remnants of varied significance from the company attic, corporate promotional tools, and some figurative wooden nickels, since many of the engines are backdated, altered originals or conjectural “replicas,” created when the railroad sought a usable past. Following the radial layout of the roundhouse, visitors proceed from a replica of Peter Cooper’s 1830 Tom Thumb to a 1902 Atlantic (4-4-2-type) engine, with more recent steam and diesel loco­ motives located in a yard outside. Signage is minimal, old, and some­ times inaccurate, leaving the engines with a single mute message of technological progress and improvement. Once freed of corporate control, the museum’s new curators felt these inadequacies even more keenly than any historically informed visitor. But where to begin? As the staff realized, even the museum’s implicit lessons were lost to many younger patrons who, by 1987, had little awareness of modern railroading, let alone any historical sense of the towering social, economic, and technical impact of railroads in American history. For Baltimore’s schoolchildren, the engines at Mt. Clare were more remote than dinosaurs and far less appealing. Real­ izing this lack of personal context for railroads among most visitors, the curators wisely began their remake of the museum with this orien­ tation exhibit. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided a planning grant for “America’s Great Road,” and it was designed by the mu­ seum’s former curator, John Hankey, and David Berman of db de­ sign. Using a 75-foot entry corridor to the roundhouse, the exhibit sketches the origins of railroading, the growth of the B&O, and the operations at the Mt. Clare complex during the railroad’s heyday. From the ticket lobby, visitors walk past a series of panels and cases arranged along both sides of the corridor, incorporating...