Railroad work — the shops' other history

1863–1892 AND AFTER · UNIONS, YARDS, AND THE STRIKES THAT CAME BY RAIL

The working city: The Pennsy Shops entry above counts the men; this entry is about the work as an institution. Railroad labor organized early in Fort Wayne because the shops were there: in 1863 the city's railroad men formed the Fort Wayne Union of the Brotherhood of — in Griswold's telling — the first organized body of laboring men in the city, an engineers' brotherhood local raised in the middle of the Civil War. A generation later the car inspectors and car repairers of the Fort Wayne yards organized, in 1892, as John Groff Lodge No. 67 of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen of America, chartered two years after the brotherhood itself; the lodge, its number long since grown to 6760, outlasted the Wabash and Nickel Plate lodges that merged into it — the Wabash lodge in 1965 — and its own history is a roster of the places railroad work happened here: the Pennsylvania shops, the Nickel Plate's depots and, from 1951, the East Wayne freight yard four miles east near New Haven, to which the carmen transferred when Nickel Plate passenger work ended in 1959. The yards were the work's other geography: the Pennsylvania's yards beside the shops, the Nickel Plate's Piqua Yard in the city and then East Wayne, the West Wayne yard of the Lake Erie and Western between Van Buren Street and Runnion Avenue.

1864 — the shops shut in wartime: Fort Wayne's first great railroad strike came not in 1877 but in 1864, and Griswold, who devoted part of his history to the city's strikes, tells it in detail. In January 1864 the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago announced that wages would thereafter be paid in company warrants instead of national currency; the men, fearing the warrants would be redeemed only at a discount, protested formally, were refused, and ceased work. All departments of the Fort Wayne shops closed, four hundred men were idle, and a parade of five hundred strikers and their friends marched on the office of the western division's superintendent, H. A. Gardner, to demand their wages due. While the shopmen were out, the engineers and firemen presented their own case — engineers asking a raise from $75 to $90 a month, firemen from $35 to $45, and runs shortened from a hundred miles and more to seventy-two or eighty a day. The company, fearing for its Fort Wayne property, asked for military protection, and a company of troops was sent from Pittsburgh to guard it — the railroad's own city protected from the railroad's own men, in the middle of a war the shops were supplying.

1877, and the honest gap: The strike of 1877 — the Great Railroad Strike that began on the Baltimore and Ohio — reached Fort Wayne as it reached every city on the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago, the road on which the strike's Pittsburgh leadership had organized. Griswold calls 1877 "the greatest industrial upheaval in the history of Fort Wayne," and The Nation of 26 July 1877 listed Fort Wayne among the places where crowds compelled the stoppage of work at factories and mills; the carmen's lodge history adds the local color of strikers commandeering a locomotive to haul the caboose that served as their headquarters, and the railroad and police taking the engine back and locking it in a roundhouse until the strike was resolved. The 1877 strike as an event — its crowds, its course and its suppression — is told in the Wars, Riots and Unrest section and is not re-told here. Of the other national railroad struggle of the century, the Pullman boycott of 1894, no Fort Wayne-specific account was found in the sources reached for this section, and none is invented: the city's documented strike record, in the sources, runs 1864 and 1877, and the labor history that grew from them.

Sources: Griswold, Pictorial History of Fort Wayne (1917), the strikes chapter, read first-hand — the 1864 warrant strike in full (the January announcement, the four hundred idle, the parade of five hundred, Superintendent Gardner, the engineers' $75-to-$90 and firemen's $35-to-$45 demands, the troops sent from Pittsburgh) and the 1863 railroad men's union as the city's first organized body of labor; the Wars, Riots and Unrest section's 1877 record — Griswold's "greatest industrial upheaval" and The Nation of 26 July 1877; History of TCU Lodge 6760 — the carmen's organization of 1892 as Lodge 67, the Wabash lodge merger of 1965, the West Wayne yard, East Wayne yard from 1951 and the 1959 transfer, and the commandeered-locomotive account of 1877, carried as the lodge's telling.