Unrecorded Alabama Railroad Circular

[Alabama]: [Railroads]:

[Circular Letter Calling for a Convention in Mobile "For the Purpose of Advancing the Interests of a Projected Road to Connect the Alabama and Tennessee Rivers"].

Mobile: December 12, 1849. Printed circular, , 9.75 x 7.5 inches, on a single folio sheet of blue paper, integral blank addressed on verso to R.B. Waller of Greensboro, Alabama, ink postmark from Selma. Old folds, minor staining, small hold to integral blank from removed seal. Overall very good condition. Item #12825

An unrecorded circular letter from 1849, calling for a convention in Mobile, Alabama to discuss provisions for a railroad line to connect the Alabama and Tennessee rivers. The document is dated at the head from Mobile on December 12, 1849, followed by three paragraphs of italic text, and concludes with the typed signatures of fifty members of the committee of the proposed convention. This convention in Mobile was proposed after a similar "Rail Road Convention" was concluded in Selma. The meat of the document is in the final paragraph, which reads, in part: "Believing that you feel a deep interest in the success of any enterprise that has for its object the development of the internal resources of Alabama...we cannot doubt your readiness to cooperate with us in the furtherance of this desirable object. The enterprise itself cannot be regarded as a local one.... When we take into consideration the vast results that must ensue to the State at large, by opening such a communication between the navigable waters of North and South Alabama, by making available the vast amount of hidden wealth that now lies deposited between the two Rivers, and more than all, by bringing the two sections of the State into more immediate neighborhood, and thus uniting and consolidating interests that have long remained distinct, and in some measure at variance with each other, the enterprise assumes an importance which the most sanguine can hardly over estimate."

Construction on an effort to connect the two rivers begin at Selma in 1851, but it had only reached Talladega when the Civil War began. Following the war, another group began the Alabama Grand Trunk Railroad, building a road from Mobile to Mount Vernon by 1872, then extending it to the Tombigbee and, abandoning the proposed route to Selma, moving toward Elyton by the mid-1880s (this line was then sold and renamed the Mobile and Birmingham Railroad Company in 1887).

A foundational document in building interest for a North-South railroad in Alabama, though we have not found evidence that the convention actually took place. An interesting and unrecorded circular, with no records in OCLC or auction history.

Price: $950