iPentimento | Genealogy and History

A Personal History With Trains

Before there were so many cars on the road, or even roads as we know them now, the main mode of transportation was the steam train used to carry passengers to far distant destinations as well as goods to market. Even in our Yates family, we have a connection to train engines.

The following is an excerpt from my Great Aunt Martha’s memoirs written in 1977-79 that will set the stage for the rest of the tale. The year was 1919, and with no real work in West Plains, Missouri, Martha, her husband Fred Scott and their two children Claude and Evelyn came to Washington state with hopes of a better life.

……We left West Plains about July the 29^th and arrived in Tacoma August 2^nd 1919. So the big Union Railroad Depot on 19^th and Pacific was the first building I was in here in Washington. Fred went and got a hotel room near the depot. I believe the name of it was the Rainier Hotel. It had two beds and Claude slept with daddy and Evelyn with Mamma. And was it ever a treat to have a bed to lay down on and stretch out. After just riding in the train coach for 5 nights and 4 days, or vice versa. While I was on the train, I felt sometimes like I would like to just get out of that seat and stretch out in the aisle. ….

…..The next morning we took the train on down through Olympia and on down toward Centralia, but the Mason County Logging Company had built what they called a spur to run out to the main line so as to be able to get their big logs on flat cars shipped out to other places. It was August 3^rd, and Fred’s 24^th birthday….

……When we got to that spur, the little engine called the 8 Spot was there waiting for the train to come, and who would I see but my brother Lem climbing off that engine to greet us. He was the engineer and it was a happy meeting for me. They called that place the Junction. The engine had a passenger car hooked onto it and that was how we rode into Bordeaux, [the logging town is now gone] Washington…..

Back to present day 2007, and a remarkable incident once more brings that little engine into our family history. This summer my aunt and uncle Twyla and Wally Yates were vacationing near Ft. Bragg on the California coast in Mendocino county, and they decided to re-visit the historical museum there since it had not been open when they were there the previous year. That previous year Wally had spied a brochure for the museum in the motel lobby and he was very intrigued to see what looked like a very familiar train engine.

Yes, it was the “Eight Spot” engine, known to Wally as “Dinky” when he was a young boy living in Bordeaux. Wally’s mother [my grandmother Minnie Smith Yates] had died in 1932 and he, along with his father and two brothers Gale and Guy, had moved in with his sister Rhoda and her husband Martin Barnett. Martin had worked in the roundhouse in Bordeaux refueling the engines, and some evenings Wally would go to work with “Mart”.

So, there you have it, but there seems to be a difference in the numbers on the engines. I would have thought that someone’s memory was off a bit, except that there was one more piece of ‘evidence’ that adds to the mystery, or confirms our family history with the engine. It is the picture below, taken at the same museum on the same day. Are these the same engines and parts, or a collection of many items? Looks like I will need to write to the museum…..

Copyright 2007 CJW-webduck

Follow-up On The Number 7 Engine