History►Trains

In search of Laura E. Armitage

It was the morning after the HighEdWeb North Carolina conference and I was gathering sources about the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (as one does) before boarding the Carolinian to return to the Northeast. I was a little surprised to find that there wasn’t a recent book-length academic history and was falling back on JSTOR for journal articles. I was caught up short by a pair of articles in The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin (now Railroad History) by Laura E. Armitage.[1][2]

Laura E. Armitage? In 1944? With a few key exceptions, railroading, then and now, is something of a boys’ club. Officials, engineers, maintenance of way workers, they’re almost all men, though that’s changing. If you go to a railroad memorabilia show, it’s men and boys with trailing spouses. Go rubberneck a derailment on the Lehigh Line in a mild rain? You’ll bump into men. And we’re not talking now, we’re talking the 1940s. Who was Laura E. Armitage, chronicler of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway?

Biography

She was born in 1888 or 1889, and grew up in Richmond, Virginia. Her elder brother was John H. Armitage, who helped build the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad in Brazil.[3] She attended the Hollins Institute (now Hollins University) in Roanoke, graduating in 1907. Her yearbook lists numerous activities:[4]

  • Secretary of the Euzelian Literary Society
  • Member of the Capitol Club and the Kodak Club
  • Vice President and Historian of A. C. Class
  • Treasurer of the YWCA

The yearbook entry also includes the cryptic entry “Captain Yemassees,” which no doubt meant something to contemporary readers.

Her life between 1907 and 1917 is a blank. She was a Presbyterian and edited the magazine Onward, a church publication, beginning in 1917.[5][6] She got away to Europe in the closing stages of World War I with the YWCA, and almost got a job with the “University of Sofia”" (unclear which institution this is) before political instability in Bulgaria scuppered the opportunity.[6:1] In 1926 the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway hired her to be the co-editor of its employee magazine (then called the Chesapeake and Ohio and Hocking Valley Employees’ Magazine, it went through several names). The Hollins alumni magazine says she was the first woman to hold such a post.[7] She was active in the Richmond chapter of Altrusa and contributed articles to the National Altrusan.[8]

As co-editor of the employee magazine she wrote on a variety of topics. From the archives of the Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society (the COHS) comes a poem called “The Sportsman”, commemorating the C&O’s named train between Washington and the Midwest. A sample:[9]

The shadows yield to the vision that marches

​ Dullness is cut by the flash of the train,

And land, long asleep, sets by its yawning,

​ Foretelling action with a thrill again.

In the 1940s she had the title “Research Analyst” and was involved with the corporate history of the company.[10] It was in this role that she contributed the two articles to the Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin. She compiled for internal use an index of all annual reports between 1837 and 1929.[11] She was active in the Virginia Historical Society for decades.[12] She retired from the C&O in 1953 on reaching the mandatory retirement age of 65.[13] The C&O hired three people to replace her.[6:2]

There isn’t much to indicate what she was like. COHS has two photographic portraits, both (probably) from the late 1920s or early 1930s, as she approached middle age. A group photo from 1929, at the opening of a new bridge in Cincinnati, shows a woman of average height, with a cloche hat and heels.[14]

We may find a hint from a cultural brouhaha that took place in Richmond (or, at least, in the pages of the Richmond Times-Dispatch) in 1950. James Johnson Sweeney curated an exhibit of American painting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Some of Sweeney’s selections, including one of Hyman Bloom’s infamous “cadaver” images, provoked a local controversy and a mocking editorial from the Times-Dispatch.[15] This provoked a flurry of letters for and against, including one from Armitage, who praised museum curator Lewis Cheek and wrote that while she “may not be able to appreciate all that modern art implies” she was “grateful to the museum for considering my intelligence up to the average.”[16]

We learn from the society column of the Richmond Times-Dispatch that she took a two-month around-the-world cruise on the SS Rotterdam in 1964, and that her friends held a coffee party for her before she departed.[17] Laura E. Armitage died in Richmond on November 6, 1981, at the age of 93. If she ever married or had children, no obituary mentioned them.[13:1]

Histories of the C&O

The original exercise was looking for book-length treatments of the C&O. Most of my books deal with Michigan, Pennsylvania, New England, or Europe. The C&O is mostly in the Tidewater, Kentucky, and Ohio. I do have sources dealing with the Pere Marquette, which the C&O acquired in the 20th century. I don’t know if Armitage ever intended to write one or if her focus was elsewhere.

Charles W. Turner published Chessie’s Road in 1957 and it received a split decision. Joseph T. Lambie, writing in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, was unimpressed, faulting source quality and analysis.[18] On the other hand John F. Stover, in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, called out “extensive documentation clearly indicates a major reliance on original sources[…].”[19] They can’t both be right.

Patrick C. Dorin published The Chesapeake and Ohio Railway: George Washington’s Railroad in 1982. I have several of Dorin’s books and they tend to be heavy on pictures and short on text. This one is no different, and received a scorching review from Roger White in Railroad History: “It is a collection of recent pictures chosen in a biased manner and surrounded by a thin, error-ridden text.”[20]

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society for their kind permission to reproduce the portrait of Laura E. Armitage and to quote from the “The Sportsman.”

  1. Armitage, Laura E. “Louisa Railroad—1836-1850 Virginia Central Railroad—1850-1868.” The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, no. 65 (1944): 59–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43519953 ↩︎

  2. Armitage, Laura E. “Richmond and Alleghany Railroad.” The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, no. 88 (1953): 59–68. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43520070. ↩︎

  3. “John H. Armitage”, Tampa Bay Times, June 8, 1959 ↩︎

  4. The Spinster (1907), p. 11. ↩︎

  5. “The Writer’s Directory of Periodicals.” The Writer 38, no. 5 (May 1926), inside cover. ↩︎

  6. “Retiring, But Untired Employee Of C&O ‘Just Can’t Quit Work’”, The Richmond News Leader, May 5, 1953. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

  7. “Personals.” Hollins Alumnae Quarterly 3, no. 2 (July 1928): 22–23. ↩︎

  8. Armitage, Laura E. “My Job and How I Happened to Drift Into It.” National Altrusan 6, no. 3 (November 1928): 9. ↩︎

  9. Extract from C&O employee magazine featuring poem “The Sportsman” by Laura E. Armitage. AD - 22, Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society Archives. https://archives.cohs.org/. ↩︎

  10. Hidy, Ralph W., and Muriel E. Hidy. “Research Notes.” The Journal of Economic History 8, no. 2 (1948): 243–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2113326. ↩︎

  11. Cover page of document “Index of Annual Reports of Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company Predecessor Companies” by Laura E. Armitage. COAR - INDEX, Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Society Archives. https://archives.cohs.org/. ↩︎

  12. “Proceedings of the Virginia Historical Society. In Annual Meeting, January 19, 1949.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 57, no. 2 (1949): 200–220. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4245628. ↩︎

  13. “Retired railway officer dies”, Richmond Times-Dispatch, November 7, 1981. ↩︎ ↩︎

  14. Cooper, Myrtle I. “New Ohio River Bridge Opens for Traffic.” The Chesapeake and Ohio and Hocking Valley Employes’ Magazine (May 1929): 3-5. ↩︎

  15. “Mr. Sweeney–a Macabre Humorist?”, Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 23, 1950. ↩︎

  16. Laura E. Armitage, “Our Excellent Art Museum”, Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 22, 1950. ↩︎

  17. Louise Ellyson, “People around Richmond,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, January 16, 1964. ↩︎

  18. Lambie, Joseph T. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 65, no. 2 (1957): 241–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4246311. ↩︎

  19. Stover, John F. The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43, no. 4 (1957): 685–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/1902300. ↩︎

  20. White, Roger B. Railroad History, no. 146 (1982): 110–12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43520896. ↩︎