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Remember When, Chattanooga? Tennessee and Georgia officials fought over the General locomotive

Contributed photo from ChattanoogaHistory.com. The General, a famed Civil War-era locomotive, is shown in the 1960s. In 1967, Chattanooga officials, who considered the steam engine a city heirloom, diverted the General on its way to a train museum in Kennesaw, Georgia, where it resides today.
Contributed photo from ChattanoogaHistory.com. The General, a famed Civil War-era locomotive, is shown in the 1960s. In 1967, Chattanooga officials, who considered the steam engine a city heirloom, diverted the General on its way to a train museum in Kennesaw, Georgia, where it resides today. Contributed photo from ChattanoogaHistory.com. The General, a famed Civil War-era locomotive, is shown in the 1960s. In 1967, Chattanooga officials, who considered the steam engine a city heirloom, diverted the General on its way to a train museum in Kennesaw, Georgia, where it resides today.

By Mark Kennedy 3 min read

In 1967, officials in Tennessee and Georgia battled in court over possession of the General, a Civil War-era steam locomotive previously at the center of a war adventure known as the Great Locomotive Chase.

A 2016 local history column by Sam D. Elliott in the Chattanooga Times Free Press explained the 1862 Civil War “chase” as “an episode in April 1862 in which Union raiders hijacked a train pulled by a steam locomotive, the ‘General,’ with the intention of destroying bridges, track and telegraph wire between Chattanooga and Marietta, Georgia.

But then, “a determined pursuit by Confederates frustrated the plan, and the General was abandoned by its captors just north of Ringgold,” Elliott wrote.

The General was on display at Chattanooga’s Union Station train terminal from the 1890s until the early 1960s and was considered a city heirloom until its corporate owners, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, took it on a nationwide tour in 1961 and then announced it would be moved permanently to Georgia in 1967. The move set off hard feelings – and eventually court action – here. (The state of Georgia had tried twice previously to win custody of the train in court, according to historian Elliott.)

The photo accompanying this article is believed to have been taken in the 1960s, according to Barbara Kelley, the widow of former Chattanooga Mayor Ralph Kelley, who tried to return the train to Chattanooga in 1967. Kelley died in 2004.