Perhaps nothing is as iconic in Chattanooga as the railroad. Since 1850, when the Western & Atlantic tracks were laid, trains have defined this city. It was the railroad that made Chattanooga the "Gateway to the Confederacy" and the target of Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War. In the years following Reconstruction, the railroad was responsible for the city's rebirth. Countless train tracks still crisscross streets throughout the city, and visitors pose for photos in front of the Chattanooga Choo-Choo while humming the famous Glenn Miller song. Trains chug today through the Western & Atlantic Railroad tunnel at Missionary Ridge.
However, the first "railroad" in Chattanooga was the Underground Railroad.
Jacob Cummings was an enslaved 3-year-old in 1819, the year the United States entered into a treaty with the Cherokee Nation setting the Tennessee River as the boundary with the United States. Hamilton County was established on the northern banks of the river across from Ross's Landing, and it included the peninsula known as Moccasin Bend. Throughout the 1820s, land speculators bought large tracts of land throughout the county. Riverfront property was especially popular. James Smith was one of those men buying in the area of Moccasin Bend. By the time he arrived in the newly created Hamilton County, Smith owned more than a dozen enslaved people, including young Jacob Cummings.
Read more Chattanooga History Columns
- Gaston: Paul John Kruesi was Edison's right-hand man
- Robbins: The old Richardson's house and the Civil War
- Gaston: James Williams was a man of the world
- Raney: Mason Evans, the 'Wild Man of the Chilhowee'
- Gaston: The legacy of Adolph Ochs endures
- Martin: Ed Johnson said, 'I have a changed heart,' the day before his lynching in Chattanooga on 1906
- Thomas: The inventiveness of Judge Michael M. Allison
- Moore: Chattanooga's first Chinese community
- Summers, Robbins: Chattanooga's Tuskegee Airman - Joseph C. White
- McCallie: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 says so!
- Gaston: John McCline's Civil War - from slave to D.C. parade
- Raney: Exploring Chattanooga businesses in the Green Book
- Elliott: Remembering the Freedmen's Bureau in Chattanooga
- Gaston: Nancy Ward was a beloved, respected Tennessean
- Martin: Prohibition - the noble experiment
- Elliott: 'A shameful, disgraceful deed': The destruction of the Sewanee cornerstone
- Gaston: Robert Cravens was ironmaster, Chattanooga area's first commuter
- Robbins: Dr. T.H. McCallie's Christmas 1863
- Robbins: Journalist writes of a trip to Missionary Ridge in 1896
- Summers, Robbins: Mine 21 disaster - gone but not forgotten
- Elliott: Collegedale incorporates to avoid Sunday 'blue laws'
- Gaston: 'Marse Henry' Watterson's journalism fame began in Chattanooga
- Robbins: Orchard Knob battle recalled in 1895
- Elliott: Chattanoogans joined in an 'orgy of joy and gladness' on Armistice Day, 1918
- Thomas: Noted service, speakers are marks of Rotary Club of Chattanooga since 1914
- Summers and Robbins: Remembering noted Tennessee author North Callahan
- Raney: 'I auto cry, I auto laugh, I auto sign my autograph'
- Gaston: Sequoyah's alphabet enriched Cherokees
- Robbins: A look at Sam Divine's life during the Civil War
- Robbins: Memories of a Confederate nurse
- Robbins: More notes from Bradford Torrey's 1895 visit to Chickamauga Battlefield
- Robbins: Journalist in 1895 details visit to Chickamauga Battlefield
- Elliott: Telephone exchange firebombing was distraction for grocery store robbery
- Gaston: Worcester brought Christ's message to Cherokee at Brainerd Mission
- Robbins: 1896 travel diary: 'A Week on Walden's Ridge'
- Gaston: Elizabeth Strayhorn, WAC Commandant at Fort Oglethorpe
- Robbins: The history of the Friends of Moccasin Bend National Park
- Moore: Do you own a Sears Roebuck home?
- Summers and Robbins: Camp Nathan Bedford Forrest in World War II
- Gaston: Hiram Sanborn Chamberlain remembered
- Elliott: Daisy the center of tile, ceramic manufacturing in Hamilton County
- Gaston: FDR inaugurates the Chickamauga Dam
- Summers, Robbins: Interned WWII Germans had it easy at Camp Crossville
- Elliott: A war correspondent on Lookout Mountain
- Gaston: Chickamaugas finally bury hatchet in Tennessee Valley
- Gaston: Chickamaugas in Chattanooga
- Robbins: The history of the Riverbend festival
- Raney: Sadie Watson, the first woman elected in Hamilton County government
- Moore: Remembering Chattanooga's Hawkinsville community
- Elliott: Welsh coal miners transformed Soddy after the Civil War
- Gaston: Chattanooga's best-kept secret
- Elliott: Cabell Breckinridge loses his horse
- Raney: Martin Fleming is the people's judge
- Gaston: The amazing career of Francis Lynde
- Martin: Hamilton County's Name Sake: Alexander Hamilton
- Summers, Robbins: The crosses at Sewanee
- Bledsoe: The fiery truce at Kennesaw Mountain
- Moore: Talented architect's life cut short by tragedy
- Rydell: Chattanooga's place in soccer history
- Robbins: Tennessee Coal, member of the First Dow Jones Industrial Average
- Raney: In the barber chair
- Lanier: Becoming the Boyce Station Neighborhood Association
- McCallie: John P. Franklin: Living history among us
- Barr: Chattanooga's first railroad: The Underground Railroad
- Summers, Robbins: Charles Bartlett was a Pulitzer Prize winner, Kennedy confidant
- Rainey: 'We have seen it'
- Elliott: Feinting and fighting at Running Water Creek and Johnson's Crook
- Gaston: The Spring Frog Cabin at Audubon Acres
- Raney: Wauhatchie Pike was moonshine motorway
- Robbins: Oakmont was home of venerable Williams clan
- Summers and Robbins: Rebirth of the Mountain Goat Line
- Elliott: Bad investments led to Soddy Bank failure in 1930
- Summers and Robbins: Pearl Harbor attack left football behind
- Gaston: Jolly’s Island namesake had long ties with Sam Houston
- Return Jonathan Meigs, Indian Agent
- Moore: Did you know about St. Elmo's other two cemeteries?
- Summers: Orme - Marion County's almost lost community
- Davis: Spooky revival at Sharp Mountain in 1873
- Robbins: The story of Longholm
- Raney: Women labored to help the U.S. win World War I
- Even in the city, the 'wheel' changed everything
- Murray: Confederate dilemma after Chickamauga
- J.B. Collins — Newsman extraordinaire
- Robbins: The Story of the Lyndhurst Mansion
- Chattanooga artist and wife lost on the Lusitania
- Chattanooga History Column: Battelle, Alabama and the Battelle Institute
- John Ross, a founder of Chattanooga
- Hamilton County casualties in World War I
- Chattanooga Power Couple
- 'Somewhere in France'
- The Ray Moss family
- Battery B from Chattanooga
- Ulysses S. Grant, Clark B. Lagow, and the Chattanooga Bender
- Songbirds Museum Timeline
- Hamilton County World War 1 roster
- The Soddy Girl and the Memphis Belle
- Blues icon Bessie Smith was the Empress of Soul
- Women's Army Corps at Chickamauga
- Emma Bell Miles' life at the top of the 'W'
- The Tivoli Wurlitzer is one of Chattanooga's priceless assets
- Chattanooga in struggle for freedom during Civil War
- October 1918, Chattanooga paralyzed by Spanish flu epidemic
- Eli Lilly and the Ditch of Death
- One hundred years ago, Chattanooga goes to war
- The legacy of Anna Safley Houston
- Harriet Whiteside was ahead of her time
- Southern Adventist University
- Chattanooga native's writings aided Civil Rights movement
- Zion College, Chattanooga's only African American College
- The North Shore's hidden past
- Mayme Martin -- Businesswoman and community leader
- Thomas Sim's epic struggle for freedom
- Top of Cameron Hill was price of rerouting interstate
- Cameron Hill has rich history
- Temperance movement included Harriman university
- The sweetest music this side of Heaven
- Conquistadors at Chattanooga
- Chattanooga and the 'General'
- Chattanooga's first Thanksgiving, 1863
- Chattanooga's greatest flood caught city unaware
- Opening the Cracker Line
- European trip in 1900 enlightens Sophia Scholze Long
- Sophia Scholze Long spoke out when others were silent
- Little South Pittsburg and its big silent movie stars
- Lot attendant recalls hottest job in Chattanooga
- Chattanooga's Forest Hills is final resting place for known, unknown
- Burritt College -- Pioneer of the Cumberlands
- Chattanooga's nicknames trace city's evolution
- The 25th annual meeting of the Tennessee Press Association
- Clemons Brothers Furniture Store
- The Short Life of the USS Chattanooga
- Ellen Jarnagin McCallie lived a truly remarkable life
- Dr. Jonathan Bachman was a revered city father
- Second guessing the Confederate failure on Missionary Ridge
- Nancy Kefauver, ambassador for the arts
- William Gibbs McAdoo kept his Southern roots
- Chattanooga's Secretary of the Treasury
- Howard Baker remembered as a statesman/photographer who snapped history
- Tivoli's last picture show
- The history of one of Chattanooga's oldest businesses
- Chattanooga's roller derby skaters
- Myths of Coca-Cola in Chattanooga
- Chattanooga's neighborhood grocery stores
- The tale of the Scottsboro Boys
- The people's history of Chattanooga
- Howard School is Chattanooga's reminder of Reconstruction
- Elevator operator, painter, mystery man: meet Rice Carothers
- Raulston Schoolfield made enemies amid his rise to power
- Website lets users peer into Chattanooga's past
- The flood of 1917
- Chattanooga's 'wickedest woman' buried at Forest Hills
- History of Cummings Highway
Cummings grew up laboring on Smith's "lower farm," which stretched from near today's locations at Baylor School along the western bank of Moccasin Bend south to the National Park at the Brown's Ferry Federal Road Trace. Each year, Smith would travel to Alabama to buy and sell horses, and young Cummings went with him, likely crossing at Brown's Ferry.
As Smith's wealth increased, he became increasingly an absentee owner at the Bend and spent much time at his properties near Hixson and Dallas, an earlier county seat. He became well connected to families in the area. One daughter married William H. Stringer, namesake of Stringer's Ridge, and another married Henry Simmerman, who died on Moccasin Bend in 1838 at the time of the Cherokee Removal. One of Smith's son-in-law's sisters was the wife of a Mr. Leonard, who ran a grocery in the newly named town of Chattanooga.
Smith gave Cummings additional responsibilities at the lower farm around Moccasin Bend, but the enslaved man often received severe beatings for any of his mistakes or those of other farm hands. At times, Smith sent Cummings on errands into the city, where he met Mr. Leonard, the grocer. Cummings described Leonard, who was from Albany, N.Y., as "a fine man." He "was an abolitionist, but didn't dare say anything." Leonard showed Cummings how to find north using the stars on clear nights and moss on the trees on cloudy nights and quietly encouraged him to leave his harsh life behind.
One day in 1839, Smith lashed Cummings' mother when cats stole his fish, and the 23 year-old decided to act. "Well I was down at the lower farm and I made up my mind to take Leonard's advice and about eleven o'clock in the morning in the latter part of July I started. I went across to the island in an injun canoe and stayed about two days, when the woman who lived on the island - they were poor folks - told me that she thought they were coming to search the island, and so I walked to the lower end and we had high water then I never swam more easily than that half mile and tuk right up Walden's Ridge I paid a man to write me a free paper and concealed myself in the Sequatcha Valley from pursuers I travelled on into the northern part of Tennessee and across Kentucky to the Ohio River With a rail I broke a lock that fastened a skiff and reached the Ohio shore just before daylight."
After more than a year on the run, Jacob Cummings was a free man. In 1894, historian Wilbur Siebert interviewed Cummings for his book, "The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom." (Read the transcript online at www.ohiomemory.org.) Thanks to the work of Siebert, digital preservation and importantly the tenacity of Jacob Cummings, we can hear firsthand from the man who was likely the first railroad passenger in Chattanooga. That train may not have been on our city's famous tracks or immortalized in song, but for at least one day in 1839, the Underground Railroad stopped at Moccasin Bend.
Chris Barr is a ranger with the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. For more, visit Chattahistoricalassoc.org.